CIA faults administration for ignoring Intelligence before the Iraq War.

When George Tenet left the CIA he commissioned a series of three reports on how Intelligence did about predicting event in Iraq and how the administration used that Intelligence. This report discussed by USA Today is the first of the three declassified. It was completed in Summer of 2004 but not released until after the election.

By John Diamond, USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — A newly released report published by the CIA rebukes the Bush administration for not paying enough attention to prewar intelligence that predicted the factional rivalries now threatening to split Iraq.

Policymakers worried more about making the case for the war, particularly the claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, than planning for the aftermath, the report says. The report was written by a team of four former CIA analysts led by former deputy CIA director Richard Kerr.

"In an ironic twist, the policy community was receptive to technical intelligence (the weapons program), where the analysis was wrong, but apparently paid little attention to intelligence on cultural and political issues (post-Saddam Iraq), where the analysis was right," they write.

Did the White House trust the imagery analysts more than the cultural and historical analysts, or did they just selectively use the resultst that agreed with what they wanted to say?

The first is the polite interpretation, but the second is probably the truth.