Via Atrios, I find this editorial from the (Minneapolis-St. Paul) Star-Tribune. Since the Strib has put in place the World's Most Annoying Online Registration scheme, I'll quote at length:
Now Bush is proposing an investigation of U.S. intelligence that would go on until 2005. Hans Blix, the former chief U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq, had it about right when he told the Washington Post, "They aren't giving up. They all prefer to retreat under a mist of controversy rather than say, 'I'm sorry, this was wrong.' "
Even as the White House announced the new commission, no one from the administration stepped forward to concede that the evidence it presented on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction — the "evidence, not conjecture" in Secretary of State Colin Powell's famous phrase — was in fact all conjecture, and all wrong. By setting a commission in motion while avoiding the admission of failure, they create the mist Blix mentioned.
Let's be clear: The failure of the administration's evidence on Iraq's WMD is not a case of 20-20 hindsight, as some apologists for Bush assert. The president himself was flat-out wrong when he said last week that Saddam Hussein refused to "let us in." Before the war, Blix's weapons inspectors were on the ground in Iraq examining the specific sites and looking for the precise materials mentioned in the brief Powell presented to the U.N. Security Council. And they were finding nothing. Very few people worldwide bought the American case for war — before the war started.
Be clear about something else, too: The neoconservatives who designed this war had spent years criticizing the U.S. intelligence community for underplaying the threat from Iraq. The neocons were being fed a line of baloney by the Iraqi National Congress and its defectors, and the CIA wasn't buying it. When the Bush administration came into office, it thought so little of what the CIA and other agencies were presenting on Iraq that it set up a special, new unit at the Pentagon to go over the raw data and make its own judgments. For the neocons to suggest that the White House got sold bogus intelligence by the CIA is ludicrous.
(Atrios cited this editorial in a post on the strange claim — made twice now by President Bush — that Hans Blix never existed.)
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