Last night I happened upon a late night airing of a recent episode of Frontline which detailed, to a startling degree, the bureaucratic infighting surrounding the administration's Iraq policy in the wake of 9/11. The episode, aptly titled "The Dark Side," basically provides a map of the aggregation of power around the Office of the Vice President, and outlines not only Cheney's deep distrust of the CIA, but the resultant fighting between the Pentagon and the State Department.
The episode illustrates, without quite explaining, the conversion of George Tenet from his early skepticism about any Iraq connection to Al Queda to an administration cheer leader who personally vouched for the presentation that Powell would wind up giving the UN. As we now know, and as the episode chronicles, each of the three main pillars of the casus belli was fatally flawed. The information about mobile weapons labs was from a discredited drunk (Curveball) to whom our intelligence apparatus only had second-hand access through Germany's intelligence agency, who distrusted him. The information about Iraqi provision of weapons and training to Al-Queda was gathered from the tortured interrogations (in Egypt) of a high-level Queda operative (Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi) captured in Tora Bora, who later recanted. The yellowcake connection had already been discredited by Joseph Wilson, among others.
The Frontline website also has a very good collection of links to published reports surrounding these events.
None of this information is particularly new or surprising, but it bears frequent repeating.
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