Charlie Rose - Paul Pillar on now 11pm EST

Decision makers (BushCo) did not ask for nor use intelligence on post-war Iraq, or on whether Saddam had WMD or would use them.

Using just pieces of intel for your own ends is not really working for the public.

No need for arm-twisting; there are various subtle ways in which America set on going to war in 2002 can affect the intel community even without overt pressure.

Bush admin's intel questions biased the direction of the answers, ie they always ask about one thing and don't ask about anything else until they get the answers they want.

Broad, mistaken consensus among US intel and policy makers, and foreign too, that there were WMD. Should have been challenged vigorously, but environment wasn't one in which questions were desired.

Biggest challenge would be re-making Iraq afterwards, ie post-war reconstruction. Not a ripe culture for liberal democracy post-war. Long, difficult, turbulent outcome expected. In particular, sharp sectarian differences to take the form of violence maybe even to the point of a civil war without an occupying force. An occupying force that would be viewed by Iraqis in a jaundiced fashion highly dependent upon early post-war performance. (I remember ours as having been completely absent and failed. This seems to be kind of the heart of the new revelations; that BushCo not only misused the intel of reasons for going to war, but also intel of what we were likely to face coming out. They lied us into war and lied about what we'd get out of it - my interpretation.)

Iran very similar. Need to understand that there are alot of things that we don't know about Iran, as with Iraq.

Iraq a chastening experience for everybody - intel community, administration, Congress, American people.
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I know this is another major Iraq hit against BushCo - an outing of their wider abuse of the intelligence community - but it doesn't sound like much that we didn't already know, at least on the net. I guess having it formally recognized by someone from the intel community is good.

The main thing is how it plays within the media, because they really don't care about much of anything else but what they think. The fact that it is on Charlie Rose is promising, but I doubt it will affect the media's attitudes at all. Their proclivity is to dismiss anything harmful to Republicans unless it is just too overwhelmingly provocative or illegal to dismiss. We already know that NSA spying in direct defiance of specific laws against it aren't illegal enough, and we know that a sauced Repub VP shotgunning someone in the face, heart and liver isn't provocative enough. So I really don't think that Bush and Cheney being even more corrupt and war-mongering with intelligence than we already knew they were, is going to move the media to try to regain even one scrap of integrity. None of it makes a bit of difference to either Repubs or the media.