Retread Sunday Link Via Uggabugga, this trenchant point from the LA Times.

Ladies and gentlemen, keep your eyes on the unclassified report. Ignore the one the Bush administration had access to. Now go back to whatever you were doing. In the Los Angeles Times we read: (emphasis added) In a classified National Intelligence Estimate prepared before the Iraq war, the CIA hedged its judgments about Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction, pointing up the limits of its knowledge. But in the unclassified version of the NIE — the so-called white paper cited by the Bush administration in making its case for war — those carefully qualified conclusions were turned into blunt assertions of fact, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on prewar intelligence. So, the decision makers at the White House were aware of the CIA's reservations. Initially, we wondered why the report was issued on a Friday, a day when news tends to get lost over the weekend, because it seemed to totally vindicate Bush. But now it's apparent that the report, dispite Pat Roberts best effort, does contain damning information about what the White House knew.

I'd like to thank Uggabugga for saving me work, and doing it better. MEANWHILE, Professional blogger, amateur cat fancier, Kevin Drum notices this also in the L.A. Times about the infamous Chalabi relative Curveball, who apparently was disbelieved by the CIA rep., the ONLY CIA rep. who'd had contact with him -- and was then told to shut his trap:

"As I said last night, let's keep in mind the fact that this war's going to happen regardless of what Curveball said or didn't say, and the powers that be probably aren't terribly interested in whether Curveball knows what he's talking about," the CIA official wrote, according to information released Friday by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) to support the Senate Intelligence Committee's blistering, 511-page critique of America's prewar intelligence. "However, in the interest of truth," the e-mail continued, "we owe somebody a sentence or two of warning, if you honestly have reservations." No evidence suggests such a warning was given, however. And Curveball — the chief source of repeated U.S. assessments that Iraq had a mobile biological weapons program — turned out to be a fraud.

As Drum rightly points out -- this clearly signifies that the invasion was believed to be a fait accompli.