Fool me once, shame on . . . shame on . . . you?

At times I wonder why reasonable people can be drawn into debating whether the Bush administration deceived the American public with respect to the casus belli for the invasion of Iraq. Let's observe the stories like these are nowa matter of public record (this from "Powell's CIA tips were soft, Committee Says"):

One day before Mr. Powell's speech laying out the reasons to invade Iraq, a Defense Department analyst warned the agency against relying on some of the most significant informants, like an Iraqi defector code named Curveball, whom Mr. Powell planned to cite.

"I went through the speech," an unidentified military intelligence officer, an expert in biological warfare, later told the Senate Intelligence Committee, which quoted him in its report, "and I thought, my gosh, we have got — I have got to go on record and make my concerns known."

But the deputy chief of the agency's Iraqi Task Force, who said "we can hash this out in a quick meeting," rejected the worries as irrelevant. "Let's keep in mind the fact that this war's going to happen regardless of what Curveball said or didn't say, and that the Powers That Be probably aren't terribly interested in whether Curveball knows what he's talking about," the deputy chief wrote in an e-mail message obtained by the committee.

Further, let's stop debating whether the Bush administration "pressured" the agencies. It did. As illustrated by the deputy chief's assertions that:

1) The war in Iraq is an inevitability; and
2) The administration was not paying especially close attention to the accuracy of the information provided.

Thus, a clear message was delivered from the administration to the intelligence agencies: we will accept whatever you have that appears to support the war we are about to embark upon.

The ongoing attempt to lay the blame for our current circumstances on the intelligence communities is contemptible.