Cooking the "intelligence"

We're finally getting confirmation from the Defense Department's Inspector General of what we knew all along: the Defense Department cooked up a bunch of "intelligence" to fit the conclusion they had already drawn:

Intelligence provided by former undersecretary of defense Douglas J. Feith to buttress the White House case for invading Iraq included "reporting of dubious quality or reliability" that supported the political views of senior administration officials rather than the conclusions of the intelligence community, according to a report by the Pentagon's inspector general...

The report was requested in fall 2005 by Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), then chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Although the committee and a number of official inquiries had criticized the administration's prewar intelligence, Democratic senators, led by Levin, demanded further investigation of Feith's operation.

"The bottom line is that intelligence relating to the Iraq-al-Qaeda relationship was manipulated by high-ranking officials in the Department of Defense to support the administration's decision to invade Iraq," Levin said yesterday. "The inspector general's report is a devastating condemnation of inappropriate activities in the DOD policy office that helped take this nation to war."

Still, it comes a no surprise that the IG's report says no laws were broken and everything was hunky dory.

By the way, what to you call fudged "intelligence?" The word "intelligence" doesn't seem to describe it accurately. Perhaps "stupidity" would be better.