Yikes! We Reeeeally Screwed Up

The WMD report is out and it confirms that we had a huge intelligence breakdown. Forget what this means for Iraq what about future interventions? When will we know if we ever are truly threatened again? Will any of us actually take it seriously?

The following is from The Guardian:

The incompetence described in the report occasionally descends into farce, particularly over an Iraqi defector codenamed Curveball, whose fabricated tales about mobile biological laboratories and their influence on US decision-makers were reminiscent of Graham Greene's accidental spy in Our Man in Havana. Despite warnings that he was "crazy", "a waste of time", and that he had not even been in Iraq at the time of an event he supposedly saw, his claims became the subject of almost 100 Defence Intelligence Agency reports and a focus of the National Intelligence Estimate in October 2002.

Most critically, Curveball's description of mobile laboratories provided one of the highlights of Colin Powell's address to the UN security council on February 5 2003, in which the then US secretary of state laid out the justification for the invasion.