Connecting the dots

The NY Times runs a fairly devastating article about the quality of intelligence supplied by Iraqi defectors, but fails to say exactly how that intelligence related to decision-making by the Bush administration, and arguments made by it. It says that the Defence Intelligence Agency concluded early this year that no more than 1/3 of the information was potentially useful, but we need a more specific date, obviously. Half way through the article even sorta kinda almost apologizes for the Times’s many many articles by the laughable Judith Miller that passed on this crap. Nor did the paper announce when it would change it’s slogan to All the News That’s No More Than One Third Potentially Useful.

The Monday WashPost has a bunch of stories about bad and misused intelligence.

The new Bushie phrase about intelligence, intended to immunize them when their sources and claims are discredited one by one, is that it is a matter of “connecting the dots.” Mary Matalin, now Cheney’s spokesmodel, used the phrase, so did Condi: "There were many, many dots about what was going on in the Iraqi programs after 1998." George Seurat or Jackson Pollack, you be the judge.