Maureen Dowd: Intelligence failures preceding Iraq war no laughing matter

As necessity is the mother of invention, political pressure was the father of conveniently botched intelligence.
Dick Cheney and the neocons at the Pentagon started with the conclusion they wanted, then massaged and manipulated the intelligence to back up their wishful thinking.
As The New Republic reported, Cheney lurked at the CIA in the summer of 2002, an intimidating presence for young analysts. And Douglas Feith set up the Office of Special Plans at the Pentagon as a shadow intelligence agency to manufacture propaganda bolstering the administration's case.
The Office of Special Plans turned to the con man Ahmad Chalabi to come up with the evidence they needed. The Iraqi National Congress obliged with information that has now been debunked as exaggerated or fabricated. One gem was the hard- drinking relative of a Chalabi aide, a secret source code- named Curveball, who claimed to verify the mobile weapons labs.
Cheney and his Gestapo Office, as Colin Powell called it, then shoehorned all their meshugas about Saddam Hussein's aluminum tubes, weapons labs, drones and Qaida links into Powell's U.N. speech.