Kristof: Secret Obsessions at the Top

Lt. Col. Dale Davis, a former Marine counterintelligence officer now at the Virginia Military Institute, says he hears from his former intelligence colleagues that top officials "cherry-picked the intel for the most damning, and often least reliable, tidbits and produced alarming conclusions — the 45-minute chemical attack scenario, the African uranium and the Al Qaeda connection. The C.I.A. never supported these assertions."

Another person with long experience in military intelligence put it this way: "Everyone knew from the start that there was no smoking gun and the assessment was based on speculation, anecdote and outdated information, not current evidence. We didn't have the `humint' [human intelligence] capability to confirm anything one way or the other."

The administration could have been truthful, saying that the intelligence about W.M.D. was incomplete but alarming — and that in any case Saddam was a monster. Instead, officials from the president down warned us that unless we went to war, we risked a mushroom cloud at home.