I share Josh Marshall’s take on the issue of administration stonewalling on calls for an independent investigaiton of claims of intelligence failures in the pre-invasion assessment of the Iraqi threat. While most commentators are content to explain administration resistance to an investigation in terms of a wish to get the issue off the minds of the voters sooner (for example, Daniel Schorr’s commentary this morning on NPR; do you share my sense that his acumen is fading?), it is more likely that inquiries would go beyond what intelligence was provided to examine how it was consumed by the White House, which is where I think the real intelligence failures and abuses lie. Testimony by representatives of the intelligence community to an independent inquiry board would reveal the profound and unprecedented breakdown in relations between their establishment and the administration, much along the lines that Seymour Hersh described several months ago in his important New Yorkerpiece on the uraniumgate scandal. Recall that Hersh suggested that the offices of the Vice President and the Secretary of Defense have virtually built their own parallel intelligence infrastructures because of the recalcitrance of the CIA to feed them exactly the interpretations their selection biases required.

And lest you point out that Kay said the misinformation was the CIA’s problem, Marshall concludes as I have that Kay was in no position to know whether the CIA was pressured to reach erroneous conclusions or its analysis distorted by the very selective attention of administration ideologues. ” ‘Tis a poor workman who blames his tools…”

Similarly, does administration stonewalling on the 9/11 commission suggest that the truth of what was known of the impending threat is more complicated than intelligence failure at Foggy Bottom?