MSNBC - 'The Dots Never Existed'

MSNBC - 'The Dots Never Existed'
By Michael Isikoff
Investigative Correspondent
Newsweek

The saga of Curve Ball is just one of many wince-inducing moments to be found in the 500-page Senate report, which lays out how the U.S. intelligence community utterly failed to accurately assess the state of Saddam Hussein's programs for weapons of mass destruction—and how White House and Pentagon officials, intent on taking the country to war, unquestioningly embraced the flawed conclusions. In startling detail, the bipartisan report concludes that the CIA and other agencies consistently "overstated" the evidence that Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons, and was actively reconstituting its nuclear-weapons program. Hampered by a "group think" dynamic that caused them to view all Iraqi actions in the harshest possible light, the committee found, U.S. intelligence officials repeatedly embellished fragmentary and ambiguous pieces of evidence, making the danger posed by Iraq appear far more urgent than it actually was.