This is Fair and Balanced
Selected quotes from The News Hour that I feel sum up each party's position relative to the Senate's indictment of the C.I.A.
SEN. JAY ROCKEFELLER: We had flawed intelligence on enough, I think, to cause us not to go to war. And WMD, weapons of mass destruction, you know, the so-called nuclear threat/Niger thing, and the question of was there a link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida, Saddam Hussein and the destruction and 9/11 and that tragedy, which has been discounted since by the intelligence community. It didn't... you know, Pat and I, when we go back to our respective states every weekend, we see men and women who are in the guards and reserves and the regular military and they're over there, or their spouses are over there, fighting, and dying and losing limbs, and I have to ask the question of: Are we better... are the Iraqis better off that we went in there, and are we better off? And in both cases I cannot answer yes. I think we went in under false pretenses. We did not have the reason to do it, and my judgment is the president wanted to do it.
SEN. PAT ROBERTS: Well, I think that it is the job of the intelligence community, just as Jay has indicated, to use what we call red teams. You have people who simply offer, you know, contrary ideas and then, "say prove it." But then again... let me put it this way. If you're an analyst, and it was before 9/11, and there were ten dots to connect, you had to really connect eight or nine of them before you pushed the product to the policy maker to make a decision. After 9/11 everybody says, "oh, my gosh, we're too risk averse," you have the 9/11 commission saying we didn't connect the dots, we should have thought about this.
So say that the analysts has four dots and he starts to push the product, you could be wrong. So consequently everybody was leaning forward and I hope to heck that there is pressure by repeated questioning. As it turns out, in the WMD section there was not any repeated questioning, or what some people call pressure. In the other section in regards to links to terrorism, there was repeated questioning and it was a better document.
