Inquiries

The Bush administration is to announce an independent inquiry into the intelligence used to justify the war in Iraq. The purpose of course is to pin the blame squarely on the CIA rather than the President and his cabal of NeoCon advisors. "War? We didn't want to go to war, but the CIA presented such damning evidence that we felt that we had to. But remember, the threat was not 'imminent', nosiree".

This flies in the face of the facts. The NeoCons spent the last two years slagging off the CIA for being too cautious in their assessments of Saddam's WMD capability and his links to al-Qaeda. They created a parallel intelligence apparatus dedicated exclusively to telling them what they wanted to hear. And now that things have gone sour, they expect the CIA to carry the can?

It will be interesting to see whether Bush's "independent" inquiry will investigate these matters, or whether it will be another Hutton-style whitewash. My money is on the latter.

(And in other news, the White House is continuing to stonewall an independent inquiry into the September 11th attacks...)