This seems like the kind of email that would be included in a comprehensive, “independent” report on intelligence failures before the war in Iraq.
The CIA had evidence that Curveball was a shameless fabricator months before Secretary of State Colin Powell cited the Iraqi’s reports before the United Nations. But in the Feb. 4, 2003, e-mail — written a day before Powell’s U.N. appearance — the senior CIA official sharply rebuked one of those skeptical analysts. “Keep in mind the fact that this war’s going to happen regardless of what Curve Ball said or didn’t say and that the Powers That Be probably aren’t terribly interested in whether Curve Ball knows what he’s talking about,” the CIA official wrote.
This kind of written rebuke of a CIA analyst, who was right, because he or she wasn’t with the game plan dictated by the “Powers That Be” seems mighty significant, doesn’t it? As Michael Isikoff noted, it wasn’t significant enough to Bush’s WMD Commission.
[T]he new panel conspicuously omitted the “Powers That Be” e-mail that appeared in the Senate report. In fact, commission leaders seemed to not even know of its existence. “What e-mail are you talking about?” Judge Lawrence Silberman, the chairman, testily responded when asked by a Newsweek reporter why it wasn’t included in the report. “I’m mystified.” Two hours later, after Newsweek supplied the panel with a copy of the e-mail from the Senate report, a commission spokesman explained that the panel was aware of it but chose not to include it because its contents were already known. But its absence from the report raises questions of whether the Silberman panel may have “cherry-picked” evidence to exclude anything politically embarrassing to the “Powers That Be.”
Members of the panel insist that they spoke with countless analysts, all of whom told said that there was no political pressure to change their judgments about the Iraqi “threat.” But the “Powers That Be” email suggests otherwise. The fact that Silberman appears to have never even heard of the document tells us a great deal about the credibility of his report.