Hacktacular Whitewash

Telling section from Newsweek about just how HARD the Bush-Appointed Commission looked into intelligence failures before the Iraqi War:

When a Senate panel released a report last year on the disastrously bad intelligence on Iraq, it included an intriguing e-mail that showed how intensely the administration was looking for damning evidence against Saddam. The e-mail, written by a senior CIA official, addressed a debate that the agency's analysts were having about Curveball, an erratic Iraqi emigre who claimed to have seen Saddam's supposed mobile biological-weapons labs. The CIA had evidence that Curveball was a shameless fabricator months before Secretary of State Colin Powell cited the Iraqi's reports before the United Nations. But in the Feb. 4, 2003, e-mail—written a day before Powell's U.N. appearance—the senior CIA official sharply rebuked one of those skeptical analysts. "Keep in mind the fact that this war's going to happen regardless of what Curve Ball said or didn't say and that the Powers That Be probably aren't terribly interested in whether Curve Ball knows what he's talking about," the CIA official wrote.

...

Yet the new panel conspicuously omitted the "Powers That Be" e-mail that appeared in the Senate report. In fact, commission leaders seemed to not even know of its existence. "What e-mail are you talking about?" Judge Lawrence Silberman, the chairman, testily responded when asked by a NEWSWEEK reporter why it wasn't included in the report. "I'm mystified." Two hours later, after NEWSWEEK supplied the panel with a copy of the e-mail from the Senate report, a commission spokesman explained that the panel was aware of it but chose not to include it because its contents were already known.