US Version of Downing Street Memo?

Eriposte at The Left Coaster has a post up that claims to have found a smoking gun, the US equivalent of the "Downing Street Memo," proving that the government deliberately lied about the aluminum tubes in the run up to the war. The "smoking gun" is a single paragraph from the 500+ page report of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which reads as follows:

The Vice Chairman of the NIC [National Intelligence Council] and the NIOs who drafted the classified NIE [National Intelligence Estimate] told Committee staff that the statement in the unclassified white paper - "most intelligence specialists assess" the tubes are intended for a nuclear program [which was a bald-faced lie] - was used because the NIC does not refer to disagreements between intelligence agencies in unclassified documents out of concern that the country being discussed would be tipped off to a potential cover story. For example, by publishing in an unclassified paper that a U.S. intelligence agency believed the tubes were intended for a rocket program, Iraq could learn that such a use was believable and could plausibly argue to the international community that the tubes were intended for rockets, even if they were really intended for a nuclear program. [page 291 of PDF file]

Although this clearly seems to be an admission of lying about the aluminum tubes, it sounds more like an after-the-fact rationalization for lying about Iraq's WMD in general. Unfortunately, I can see a lot of people buying into that explanation and concluding that our leaders were behaving properly in lying for the good of the country. I guess the point is that as interesting as this obeservation may be, I doubt it will be seen as a smoking gun or the equivalent of the "Downing Street Memo."