For those who had any doubts that the Bush Administration manipulatedintelligence to take us into a disastrous, unprovoked and unnecessarywar, Walter Pincus’s front page story in today’s WashingtonPost is must reading. Pincus’s fine reporting in the monthspreceding the invasion exposed the divisions about the war within theintelligence community and its anger about how information was beingpoliticized. But his stories were almost always buried in the Post’sinside pages.

Today’s story, in my view, is the equivalent of America’s Downing Street Memo. PaulR. Pillar, the former CIA official who coordinated US intelligence onthe Middle East until last year now publicly accuses the Bush WhiteHouse of "cherrypicking" intelligence on Iraq to justify its decisionto go to war. "Intelligence," Pillar asserts, "was misused publicly tojustify decision already made…" This is an eerie echo of the famouswords from the Downing Street Memo–in which Britain’s MI-6 DirectorRichard Dearlove told British Prime Minister Tony Blair that "theintelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. "

As Pincus notes, this is the first time that such a senior intelligenceofficer "has so directly and publicly condemned" Bush & Company’shandling of intelligence. Pillar’s critique is also one of "the mostsevere indictments of White House actions by a former Bush officialsince Richard C. Clarke , a former National Security council staffmember, went public with his criticism of the administration’s handlingof the September 11, 2001, attacks."