Nothing to See Here, Move Along

Do you ever get the idea that the U.S. Senate just wishes the real world would go away?

That's the clear implication of the "report" they put out claiming that Saddam and WMD were like oil and water:

TO BEGIN WITH, understand that we are somewhere in the first quarter of the timeline along which a thorough post-mortem should be carried out. Even under the best of circumstances, it would be impossible to wrap up the history of Saddam's Iraq in four years given that mountains of data have yet to be fully examined--and that vast majority of suspected sites in Iraq that have yet to be explored.

I was involved in the process of exploiting captured document and other media for roughly four years. When the SSCI report says captured media has been given an "initial review" the closest analogy is that it is giving a Cliffs Notes version of the story. If you were honest, you would never say that you have read and understand the intricacies of Shakespeare because you skimmed the Cliffs Notes version. Yet that is what military intelligence, and in turn the SSCI, are saying when they insist that they have not missed anything of significance from media captured in Iraq.