dianavan, here's another article Top Mideast Analyst Accuses Bush of Politicising Iraq Intel from the Inter Press Service News Agency. It makes serious allegations that Dubya went to war without requesting - and evidently without being influenced by - any strategic-level intelligence assessments on any aspect of Iraq. excerpts..

WASHINGTON, Feb 10 (IPS) - The U.S. intelligence community's top Middle East analyst from 2000 to 2005 has accused the George W. Bush administration of distorting and politicising intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war. In an article published Friday in "Foreign Affairs" magazine, analyst Paul Pillar, who resigned from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) last year, also charges that the Bush administration ignored much of the analysis that had been prepared by the intelligence community, including its predictions of the chaos and conflict that followed the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq.

He argues that the administration not only ignored the traditional model for separating the functions of policymakers -- who are to make decisions based on facts and analyses developed by independent intelligence specialists -- from those of the intelligence analysts themselves, but "turned the entire model upside down." Indeed, says Pillar, as the national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia, the first request he received from the administration for such an assessment was not until a year after the March 2003 invasion.

The intelligence community never backed up the al Qaeda-Hussein connection, according to Pillar. "The enormous attention devoted to this subject did not reflect any judgment by intelligence officials that there was or was likely to be anything like the 'alliance' the administration said existed," he writes.

"Feeding the administration's voracious appetite for material on the Saddam-al Qaeda link consumed an enormous amount of time and attention at multiple levels, from rank-and-file counterterrorism analysts to the most senior intelligence officials. It is fair to ask how much other counterterrorism work was left undone as a result," he notes.

..Powell's chief of staff at the time, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, has also publicly charged that Cheney and Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Feith's superior, formed a "cabal" that deliberately circumvented or manipulated the normal policy-making process, including the intelligence community, in order to take the country to war.