Downing Street reporter dissects pre-war Iraq intelligence

"The [U.S. WMD] Commission found no evidence of political pressure to influence the Intelligence Community's pre-war assessment of Iraq's weapons programs."
That is only one of a number of strange conclusions by those charged with investigating the way flaky intelligence was used to justify the 2003 Iraq War.
The most vociferous advocates of an attack on Iraq were Dick Cheney, the vice-president, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Rumsfeld deputy Paul Wolfowitz. They needed Congressional support and set about obtaining it in an aggressive fashion, insisting that not only did Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction threaten America and its allies but that the dictator was closely linked to al-Qa'eda.
This was a bit of a problem for the CIA, and in particular CIA director George Tenet. The CIA's 2001 annual assessment of 'worldwide threats' had played down any immediate threat from Iraq while the Agency had repeatedly dismissed the ludicrous idea that Saddam was in league with Osama bin Laden, a claim that was also strenuously denied in private by British intelligence officials.
By early 2002, US media reported the CIA had come under intense political pressure to back up the neo-cons' claims on Iraq with Rumsfeld's Pentagon even setting up an office of special plans which looked back through all the previous intelligence, hyping up any reports linking al-Qa'eda with Iraq in order to prove the CIA wrong.