something i should have realised

[solarbird]

The operation [in the Office of Special Plans] was led by David Wurmser, author of Tyranny's Ally and the "Clean Break" strategy paper from which it emerged. Together with his partner, F. Michael Maloof, who had served under Pearle in the Reagan Defense Department... Wurmser collected raw data, much of it from defectors provided by the Iraqi National Congress, in order to prove an assumption: that Saddam had ties to al-Qaeda and was likely to hand off WMD to terrorists. Wurmser and Maloof were working deductively, not inductively: The premise was true; facts would be found to confirm it. [Emphasis added]

--PACKER George, The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq, pp 106-107.

Regular readers will note an identity relationship between this and the fundamentalist approach to creationism and other concepts of (semi-)literalist "Biblical inerrancy." The conclusion is preordained; facts which disagree must therefore be at fault; the problem lies not with the idea, but the world. Accordingly, the intelligence-manipulation argument never gained any public momentum because the President's strongest core support groups don't see how biased data-selection affects outcome, and, further, have a religious interest in not doing so.