Lying and Intelligence Gathering

The big question in recent days has changed from "Why Did Bush Lie About the WMD Intelligence?" to "Why Was the WMD Intelligence So Bad?" Of course, the implication is that Bush & Co. did not lie, they just acted on flawed information. Not only does this refer back to an earlier post on our friend Rumsfeld, but this New Yorker article, "The Stovepipe," makes the case that the Bushies pick and choose what they want to believe:

The point is not that the President and his senior aides were consciously lying. What was taking place was much more systematic—and potentially just as troublesome. Kenneth Pollack, a former National Security Council expert on Iraq, whose book “The Threatening Storm” generally supported the use of force to remove Saddam Hussein, told me that what the Bush people did was “dismantle the existing filtering process that for fifty years had been preventing the policymakers from getting bad information. They created stovepipes to get the information they wanted directly to the top leadership. Their position is that the professional bureaucracy is deliberately and maliciously keeping information from them.