GREG THIELMANN

The intelligence community, not wanting to be caught napping, tends to over-warn rather than under-warn.

They were cherry-picking the information that we provided to use whatever pieces of it that fit their overall interpretation. Worse than that, they were dropping qualifiers and distorting some of the information that we provided to make it seem even more alarmist and dangerous than the information that we were giving them.

Military intervention for disarmament is the worst possible way to do it. There are times when perhaps that is the only alternative we have… in the case of the first Gulf war -- Desert Storm -- that it was the UN inspectors -- in the years after the war -- that destroyed far more weapons and far more effectively dismantled the programs for weapons of mass destruction, than that vast armada of military forces that was utilized in Desert Storm. And of course, when the UN inspectors did it -- when under UN supervision, the Iraqis destroyed these weapons themselves -- or the UN destroyed them with Iraqi cooperation -- you do not have the same kind of side effects and toxic release and other things that happened in some cases during the war. Trying to get rid of programs of concern and weapons of concern by violence is a very bad and dangerous way to do it.

The main problem was that the senior administration officials have what I call faith-based intelligence. They knew what they wanted the intelligence to show. They were really blind and deaf to any kind of countervailing information the intelligence community would produce.

Military intervention for disarmament is the worst possible way to do it. There are times when perhaps that is the only alternative we have… in the case of the first Gulf war -- Desert Storm -- that it was the UN inspectors -- in the years after the war -- that destroyed far more weapons and far more effectively dismantled the programs for weapons of mass destruction, than that vast armada of military forces that was utilized in Desert Storm. And of course, when the UN inspectors did it -- when under UN supervision, the Iraqis destroyed these weapons themselves -- or the UN destroyed them with Iraqi cooperation -- you do not have the same kind of side effects and toxic release and other things that happened in some cases during the war. Trying to get rid of programs of concern and weapons of concern by violence is a very bad and dangerous way to do it.

The main problem was that the senior administration officials have what I call faith-based intelligence. They knew what they wanted the intelligence to show. They were really blind and deaf to any kind of countervailing information the intelligence community would produce.

The intelligence community, not wanting to be caught napping, tends to over-warn rather than under-warn.

They were cherry-picking the information that we provided to use whatever pieces of it that fit their overall interpretation. Worse than that, they were dropping qualifiers and distorting some of the information that we provided to make it seem even more alarmist and dangerous than the information that we were giving them.