so who's surprised by this?

You know, if the WMD claims hadn't led to (yet another) invasion/occupation, it wouldn't be such a big deal. However, thousands of Iraqis have died, not to mention hundreds of our own. The fact that BushCo is starting to stammer, fingerpoint, and try to pass the buck is pretty much SOP for them. So now they'll admit they were wrong but that it was the intelligence community's fault?

So if I'm given information but am told it's (probably) not true but I choose to use it as part of my argument anyway (without further verification), how is that the fault of the person who originally gave me the information? Isn't it my responsibility, especially in an *extremely* serious situation, to get as MUCH verification as to the truth of the information as possible? It's one thing to claim that a country has WMD based on your evidence. It's an entirely different matter to decide to invade a country based on that claim. In a situation that could lead to war, it seems to me that BushCo should have had enough ethical motivation to examine every perspective and analyze every fucking scrap of information they could find before making their decision.

To me, it looks like the only info they examined, even on a surface level, was information they thought they could use to justify war. It's true, the intelligence community is responsible for what they report but goddamn it - Bush is responsible for what he says, how he chooses to use that information, and the decisions he makes. You jerk - be a human for once and admit that you fucked up in a REALLY big way!