David Johnston's report on how the "Powers That Be" conned Americans into believing Iraq had weapons of mass destruction is buried so deep within the The New York Times Website today that it's virtually invisible.

You can always second-guess the way a article is played, of course, and the Times editors decided Johnston's rated only page 12 treatment in the print edition. It's not breaking news, after all, and it's just one of many stories fleshing out details of the scathing Senate Intelligence Committee's report on the CIA's prewar intelligence failures.

But the story's importance is clear, given the fact that we must wait until after the presidential election in November for the official verdict from the Senate committee on whether our bonehead Maximum Leader and his minions pressured the intelligence community into supporting a preconceived policy to invade Iraq.

Johnston describes how a CIA analyst doubted the information obtained from a crucial Iraqi source — a defector code named "Curveball" — claiming that Iraq had mobile bioweapons laboratories. When the analyst saw that Secretary of State Colin Powell was going to cite Curveball's information in his speech to the U.N. to justify going to war with Iraq, he expressed his concern.

"But the deputy chief of the agency's Iraqi Task Force," Johnston writes, "rejected the worries as irrelevant" and sent the analyst this e-mail:

Let's keep in mind the fact that this war's going to happen regardless of what Curveball said or didn't say, and that the Powers That Be probably aren't terribly interested in whether Curveball knows what he's talking about.

It didn't matter that the analyst, an expert in biological warfare, was "the only American intelligence official" to meet Curveball before the war, that Curveball showed up at their meeting with "a terrible hangover," and that "intelligence officials were not even sure of Curveball's true identity." It didn't matter because "this war's going to happen regardless."

Powell, who by his own account vetted "the backup material for each piece of evidence" cited in his U.N. speech and who demanded "multiple sources for every assertion," nonetheless included Curveball among the four sources who provided "eyewitness accounts" and "first-hand descriptions" that served as a basis for invading Iraq. (He has said he never heard any doubts about Curveball's information.)

Indeed, as the world watched and listened on Feb. 5, 2003, six weeks before the U.S. invasion began, Powell told the U.N. Security Council: "My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we are giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence."

In his speech, Powell went on to say:

One of the most worrisome things that emerges from the thick intelligence file we have on Iraq's biological weapons is the existence of mobile production facilities used to make biological agents.

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