Coyote Blog

Coyote's Law states:

When the same set of facts can be explained equally well by

1. A massive conspiracy coordinated without a single leak between hundreds or even thousands of people    -OR -
2. Sustained stupidity, confusion and/or incompetence

Assume stupidity and incompetence

Conspiracy theories have swarmed around the Internet on how the administration may have systematically lied about WMD to create the outcome (invasion) that it wanted in Iraq.  Today, however, the bipartisan presidential commission set to look into these issues unanimously confirms Coyote's Law - it was incompetence!

In a scathing report, a presidential commission said Thursday that
America's spy agencies were "dead wrong" in most of their judgments
about Iraq's
weapons of mass destruction before the war and that the United States
knows "disturbingly little" about nuclear threats posed by many of its
most dangerous adversaries...

The report implicitly absolves the
administration of manipulating the intelligence used to launch the 2003
Iraq war, putting the blame for bad intelligence directly on the
intelligence community.

"The daily intelligence briefings given
to you before the Iraq war were flawed," it said. "Through
attention-grabbing headlines and repetition of questionable data, these
briefings overstated the case that Iraq was rebuilding its WMD
programs."

Hat tip to Captains Quarters for the link.  By the way, this may take Bush off the hook to some extent for past failures, but the responsibility for reform sits squarely in his lap, and so far we have seen little progress in cleaning up the mess.