I saw this first in this piece by
George Will but I had to double check it.
David Corn reported on Huffington Post (it is in "Hubris" as well as "State of Denial")
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-corn/woodward-and-hubris_b_30646.htmlCheney's office had a burning question for him: Had he seen a particular signals intercept? It was a highly sensitive communications intercept that had captured a snippet of conversation between two unidentified people. Cheney's aides were reading raw transcripts straight from the National Security Agency. And a Cheney staffer who had gotten hold of this piece of unanalyzed intelligence thought that it contained a reference to a WMD storage site in Iraq, even though the captured exchange didn't specifically mention weapons. What made the intercept most promising was that it had come with geographic coordinates for one of the unidentified persons. Here was a road map--finally--to Saddam's WMDs. Kay ordered his analysts to review the coordinates and went back to bed.
The next morning, his analysts checked the coordinates and discovered they referred to a site in the Bekka Valley
in Lebanon--not anywhere in Iraq.
:rofl: :cry: :silly: :nopity: :wow: :banghead: :grr:
This was no lead. It was nothing. But as Kay was overseeing the search for weapons in the summer months of 2003, the vice president's office urgently wanted him to come up with evidence that Saddam had maintained arsenals of weapons of mass destruction--so much so that, just as Cheney and Libby had done before the war, the vice president's aides were rummaging through top secret, unprocessed intelligence in the hope of discovering what everyone else in the U.S. government had missed. "They were reaching down and reading raw intelligence and putting their own meaning on it," said a CIA official familiar with the incident.