[andyfox]

"I sat on the Robb-Silverman Commission. I saw many, many analysts that came before that committee. I asked every one of them--I said, `Did--were you ever pressured politically or any other way to change your analysis of the situation as you saw?' Every one of them said no."

The two official investigations, by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and by the commission co-chaired by Lawrence Silberman and Charles Robb, determined that analysts were not pressured, CIA and other U.S. intelligence professionals find that laughable -- especially the idea that analysts would answer in the affirmative when asked by commissioners or senators if they had been pressured.

W. Patrick Lang, formerly head of the Defense Intelligence Agency's Middle East section, said, "The senior guys got together and said, 'You guys weren't pressured, right? Right?'"

32 year CIA veteran Richard Kerr, brought out of retirement to lead an investigation of the agency's failures on Iraq WMD was even more blunt about the pressure brought to bear by the Bush administration. In a series of five reports, Kerr found that CIA analysts felt squeezed -- and hard -- by the administration." Kerr bluntly stated that the squeeze came from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and others within the administration:

"Everybody felt pressure. A lot of analysts believed that they were being pressured to come to certain conclusions…I talked to a lot of people who said, 'There was a lot of repetitive questioning. We were being asked to justify what we were saying again and again.' There were certainly people who felt they were being pushed beyond the evidence they had…"It was a continuing drumbeat: 'how do you know this? How do you know that? What about this or that report in the newspaper?'"

Michael Scheuer, the former CIA agent who gained prominence with his 2004 anonymous book, Imperial Hubris, backs Kerr's assessment. Scheuer noted the dissent within the CIA over the claims made in the controversial October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, a document critical in the march to war. "I know a lot of people in the Iraq shop who were dissenting," he said. "There were people who were disciplined or taken off accounts. There was a great deal of dissent about that [NIE]. No one thought it was conclusive. One gentleman that I talked to, a senior Iraq analyst, regrets to this day that he did not go public."

FWIW.