VIAJES CON MI CIA: No tengo tiempo para comentarlo, pero no quiero dejar de hacer referencia a lo que publica hoy el New York Times.

The Central Intelligence Agency was told by relatives of Iraqi scientists before the war that Baghdad's programs to develop unconventional weapons had been abandoned, but the C.I.A. failed to give that information to President Bush, even as he publicly warned of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's illicit weapons, according to government officials.

The existence of a secret prewar C.I.A. operation to debrief relatives of Iraqi scientists — and the agency's failure to give their statements to the president and other policymakers — has been uncovered by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The panel has been investigating the government's handling of prewar intelligence on Iraq's unconventional weapons and plans to release a wide-ranging report this week on the first phase of its inquiry. The report is expected to contain a scathing indictment of the C.I.A. and its leaders for failing to recognize that the evidence they had collected did not justify their assessment that Mr. Hussein had illicit weapons.

[...] While the Senate panel has concluded that C.I.A. analysts and other intelligence officials overstated the case that Iraq had illicit weapons, the committee has not found any evidence that the analysts changed their reports as a result of political pressure from the White House, according to officials familiar with the report.

[...] The possibility that Mr. Tenet personally overstated the evidence has been investigated by the Senate panel, officials said. He was interviewed privately by the panel recently, and was asked whether he told President Bush that the case for the existence of Iraq's unconventional weapons was a "slam dunk."

In his book about the Bush administration's planning for the war in Iraq, "Plan of Attack," Bob Woodward reported that Mr. Tenet reassured Mr. Bush about the evidence of the existence of Iraq's illicit weapons after Mr. Bush had made clear he was unimpressed by the evidence presented to him in a December 2002 briefing by Mr. McLaughlin. "It's a slam-dunk case!" Mr. Tenet is quoted as telling the president.

In his private interview with the Senate panel, Mr. Tenet refused to say whether he had used the "slam-dunk" phrase, arguing that his conversations with the president were privileged, officials said.

Josh Marshall, que no es precisamente un fan de Bush, califica esta información de un giro remarcable de los acontecimientos:

You might say that it turns out that the CIA was doing to President Bush what many of us were under the impression President Bush and his advisors were doing to the country.

Como sabéis, existe la teoría de que hay una guerra soterrada entre la CIA y la Casa Blanca por la que aquélla -dominada por personajes próximos al partido Demócrata poco ilusionados por la perspectiva de un segundo mandato de Bush, y muy celosos de que éste les haya privado de su habitual papel protagonista en favor del Pentágono- habría estado empujando a la administración Bush para que ésta quedara en evidencia. Cuesta pensar que hayan ido tan lejos, pero viendo esta información uno piensa que si es ésto lo que realmente ha ocurrido les ha salido el tiro por la culata. Quizás no contaban con que los tiempos que corren son por lo menos un poco más transparentes que los años oscuros de la Guerra Fría.