precisely how is a president supposed to make intelligence generally available to the public so they can evaluate it? There are two problems with that proposition, even laying aside the fact that it simply isn't done, and no president has ever done it, of either party. (There are good reasons for that.)
1. If you have any experience analyzing data, you know there are always outliers, data points that diverge from the overall pattern. Sometimes they are meaningful, most of the time they are noise. You guys who are saying you would have assigned higher reliablity to the outlying data points now are being totally disingenuous - back in 2002-2003 <i>everyone</i>, including the intelligence services of pretty much every foreign country including many who opposed the war, thought Saddam had active WMD programs and WMDs. The people here who think they would have known better are just blowing smoke - you're not trained or able to make those judgments (neither am I), and the idea that you would have been able to if only you had seen the facts is silly. What you have now is hindsight. But we all have that. If you're so smart, tell me today what will happen in, say, Kazakhstan's furtures markets in April 2009. Not so ready to to do it? I'm not surprised.
Raw data is pretty much useless. It needs to be analyzed by people who know what they're doing. That excludes the people here. It also excludes most members of Congress.
2. Intelligence data don't get released because that would compromise sources and methods. This one is so obvious it shouldn't need to be mentioned.
There might be many good arguments about whether we should have gone into Iraq, but the idea that the raw data should have been released to the public so that the "truth" could have been discerned is both ill-advised and not consonant with reality.
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