Senior State Department intelligence official Gregory Thielmann said, in a PBS interview on October 9, 2003: ” ‘Instead of our leadership forming conclusions based on a careful reading of the intelligence [on the Al Qaeda-Iraq link] we provided them,’ he said, ‘they already had their conclusion to start out with, and they were cherry-picking the information that we provided to use whatever pieces of it that fit their overall interpretations. Worse than that, they were dropping qualifiers and distorting some of the information that we provided to make it seem more alarmist and more dangerous than the information that we were giving them. …There seemed to be an unseemly eagerness to believe any information which would portray the Iraqi threat as being extremely grave and imminent.’ ”
– James Bamford, A Pretext for War, Pages 328-329