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Originally Posted by djtestudo
Clinton, as much of an idiot as he was for doing/saying what he did, was still the president and as such it can be assumed that he was privy to the same quality of intellegence as the present administration.
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Sure, but what's the point here? Are you saying that if Clinton believed the same thing that Bush believed, then Bush was right in believing it? If so, then your premise is false, because Clinton did not believe that the intelligence warranted a full-scale invasion and occupation of the country. He certainly did not believe there was any actionable connection between Saddam and AQ.
SO if Clinton's views are being cited as evidence for the quality of the intelligence, then we are led to the opposite conclusion: the intelligence did not warrant what the U.S. is currently doing in Iraq.
It is of course easy to make a dishonest case for going to war without falsifying any intelligence: you can do it by cherry-picking those bits of intelligence that support your case, refusing to declassify those that don't support your case, or declassifying them at the last minute, and redacting caveats and disclaimers from those you do declassify. The commissions were not empowered to evaluate the use of any of these obfuscating methods.
There certainly is evidence that Bush did do some of this. For instance, the NIE report that "Hussein would not use weapons of mass destruction against the United States or turn them over to terrorists unless backed into a corner" was cleared for public use only a day before the Senate vote. If the report had concluded the opposite, I'm sure it would have been cleared months before.