Grab Your Socks!
If the information Nicholas D. Kristof presents in Cloaks and Daggers is accurate, it appears that option (4) listed in a previous post here is the only available option in the AWOL WMD crisis:
"The president is a very powerful guy," said Ray Close, who spent 26 years in the C.I.A. "When you sense what he wants, it's very difficult not to go out and find it."
As best I can reconstruct events, Mr. Rumsfeld genuinely felt that the C.I.A. and D.I.A. were doing a horrendous job on Iraq — after all, he was hearing much more alarming information from those close to Ahmad Chalabi. So the Pentagon set up its own intelligence unit, and it sifted through everyone else's information and goaded other agencies to come up with more alarmist conclusions.
"He's an ideologist," one man in the spy world said of Mr. Rumsfeld. "He doesn't start with the facts, even though he's quite brainy. He has a bottom line, and then he gathers facts to support the bottom line."
That’s unfortunate; it’s genuinely difficult to plausibly justify bait-and-switch sales techniques.
1:25:09 AM 
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