More on the Silberman-Robb Report. As we noted below, the SR Report begins by stating that the commissioners were not authorized to investigate the use which policy-makers made of Iraq WMD intelligence.

At other points, however, they say things that sound rather different. For instance, at any point in the report, the commissioners state that they "found no evidence of political pressure to influence the Intelligence Community's pre-war assessments of Iraq's weapons programs."

The issue here, I think, is an extremely finely cut distinction. The commissioners say they found no analysts who would tell them they faced any political pressure to alter their analyses. At the same time, the commissioners say they did not investigate what policy-makers did with those analyses.

A good illustration of this distinction, in practice, is the Niger canard. If you look closely at what the analyses were inside the Intelligence Community, they were at best mixed. Some were certain that the documents were forgeries and the earlier reports were fraudulent. Others didn't put much credence in the reports but weren't willing to rule them out completely either. When push came to shove in October 2002 and January 2003, the CIA fought strenuously to keep the president from publicizing the allegation.

What did the administration do? They tried to air the charge every chance they got and gave no indication whatsoever that there was any doubt about its credibility.

There's your distinction.