Interesting Revelation comes out of Senate Intelligence Report Still.

In an earlier post, I point out how the forthcoming Senate Intelligence Report on the intelligence used to build the case for war was not going to deal with the crucial question of whether or not the Bush administration had in anyway misused or manipulated intelligence and intelligence sources. Still, it seems that the report is going to prove politically embarrassing for the Bush administration (although far less) insofar as the report does note that there is a huge discrepancy between a classified and unclassified version of the a National Intelligence Estimate dealing with Iraq's WMD programs. Here are some interesting snippets from the LA Times article:

In a classified National Intelligence Estimate prepared before the Iraq war, the CIA hedged its judgments about Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction, pointing up the limits of its knowledge.

But in the unclassified version of the NIE — the so-called white paper cited by the Bush administration in making its case for war — those carefully qualified conclusions were turned into blunt assertions of fact, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on prewar intelligence.

The repeated elimination of qualifying language and dissenting assessments of some of the government's most knowledgeable experts gave the public an inaccurate impression of what the U.S. intelligence community believed about the threat Hussein posed to the United States, the committee said.

[snip]

For example, the panel cited changes made in the section of the NIE dealing with chemical weapons:

"Although we have little specific information on Iraq's CW stockpile," the classified NIE read, "Saddam Hussein probably has stocked at least 100 metric tons" of such poisons.

In the unclassified version of the report, the phrase "although we have little specific information" was deleted. Instead, the public report said, "Saddam probably has stocked a few hundred metric tons of CW agents."

The Senate report also noted one instance in which a dissenting view was left out of the unclassified version.

In that example, the classified NIE stated that Iraq was developing unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, "probably intended to deliver biological warfare agents."

But in a footnote, the U.S. Air Force's director for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance said he did not agree.

By eliminating that footnote from the unclassified version, the panel said, the public NIE "is missing the fact that [the] … agency with primary responsibility for technological analysis on UAV programs did not agree with the assessment."

[snip]

The committee's report describes not just sins of omission, but of addition.

The classified NIE stated, for instance, that "Iraq has some lethal and incapacitating BW [biological weapons] agents and is capable of quickly producing … a variety of such agents, including anthrax, for delivery by bombs, missiles, aerial sprayers and covert operatives."

In the unclassified version, the words "potentially against the U.S. homeland" are inserted at the end of the statement.

Essentially, then, this indirectly deals with the manner in which Bushco used, or misused rather, the intelligence provided by giving a very clear example of White House manipulations. Again, of course, this isn't nearly as damning as finding out what the deal is with Feith's special intel team or whether or not the White House actively pressured intelligence officials to come up with the right answer, but at least it's something.