Is he serious?

From the Boston Globe:

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said yesterday that at the time he made the case to the United Nations for the invasion of Iraq some US intelligence officials already knew many of the claims about weapons and terrorist ties were suspect, but they had not informed him or other senior policy makers about their doubts.
...
''What . . . distressed me is that there were some in the intelligence community who had knowledge that the sourcing was suspect and that was not known to me," Powell told the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee. ''They knew at the time I was saying it that some of the sourcing was suspect."

I'm sorry, Colin, but even intelligent, skeptical, well-read people like me, with no connection to official government intelligence, knew at the time it was suspect. (I guess you couldn't hear me screaming at the TV during your speech.) After all,

Most of Powell's major assertions were based on faulty information. They included the claim about aluminum tubes; the existence of mobile bioweapons labs, which came from a discredited source; stockpiles of hundreds of tons of chemical agents such as VX and Sarin nerve gas; and hidden Scud missiles armed with germ warheads.

''It's hard to find any major statement in his speech that is true," said Joseph Cirincione, a weapons proliferation specialist at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. He said ''the problems with the intelligence don't excuse Powell's suspension of his own disbelief to support this flimsy case."

Besides, Colin, you've been around intelligence reports long enough to know that they usually come with all sorts of caveats and hedges. Intelligence is always imprecise. Didn't it seem strange to you that you weren't hearing ANY caveats about this information? If nobody was telling you that the information was even a little bit suspect, shouldn't THAT have been suspect to you? What does your former head of WMD intelligence have to say about this problem?

''It's disingenuous for Powell not to mention the fact that even his own people were doing their best to warn him about categorical statements and warn him about exaggerating the threats, warning him about the reliability of some of the human intelligence reporting," said Greg Thielmann, formerly Powell's chief of intelligence on nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons.

Thielmann said analysts at the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research provided Powell with a report just two days before the speech calling into question many of the claims. Among them were disagreements that Iraq's acquisition of aluminum tubing was for use in a nuclear weapons program. Thielmann had left the administration a few weeks before the speech.

Oh. Oh, Colin.

Yet Powell's comments to the Senate committee mark the first detailed acknowledgement by a senior Bush administration official that there were deep doubts in the intelligence community before the war. Congressional investigations into prewar intelligence have previously disclosed misgivings about the quality of the intelligence, but those concerns had been quiet or ignored during the debate leading up to the invasion.

And isn't that sad. Note to Congress: The best intelligence system in the world won't matter if its product is ignored.