[Happy Monkey]

Nobody (almost) disputes that almost everybody believed there were weapons. The debate was over whether what weapons they were thought to have were grounds for war. I'm not sure what you were going for with the "put the current intel community into place", since the article supports the intelligence community against the administration's scapegoating. And if "relentlessly political" is grounds for discounting the article, then I hope you don't accept anything coming out of the White House.

But back to the belief in weapons. When the new doctrine of "preemptive war" was unveiled, the State Department provided "imminent threat" as the trigger. When Bush went to war, he and his spokespeople used everything but those exect words. When it eventually was proven that there was, in fact, no imminent threat, Bush said that he never said there was. He didn't say "We all thought it was an imminent threat", he said that we had to take Saddam out before he became an imminent threat. That's like using a self defense claim in a murder trial after killing someone who may have threatened you in the future. It's alright in a pride of lions, but not in human society.