Reply #8: I seem to remember Scott Ritter and others

[G_j]

making the opposite case, some CIA folks saying they were being pressed to cook the books on Iraq.
The public you speak of were probably mostly watching FOX and CNN.
I don't believe Congress should be getting nearly as much slack as they are getting. If they didn't know better or didn't bother digging deeper then they shouldn't be trusted with the responsibility
of making life and death decisions.

-I offer Karen Kwiatkowski's take on the matter

http://www.lewrockwell.com/kwiatkowski/kwiatkowski82.html

Bagged and Tagged!
by Karen Kwiatkowski

The Senate has gingerly examined, apparently for the first time, what the CIA told them two years ago. Before this, they didn't have time to question, to peruse, to use common sense, perhaps even to read what the CIA reports said and not just follow blindly the commands of the majority whip and our wild-eyed President.

Its preliminary report indicates that much of the information was bad, and blames the CIA. The CIA was a victim of groupthink; it "interpret ambiguous elements . . . as conclusive evidence."; its corporate culture is broken. Ouch!

The CIA wasn't pressured by anyone, either. It just produced boatloads of bulls%*t all on its own. Wrong, unreasonable, made no sense, by the boatload.

Normal people (this apparently excludes most members of Congress) would wonder why you would believe anything from the CIA or DIA on Iraq anyway, given we had had no real in-country assets or visibility for years. Not even a military attaché, or a tiny hovel of a CIA station in Baghdad or Basra. Last CIA agent we had in Ba-ath country was an illegal member of the Hans Blix team.

..much more..