“In late September 2002, NSA [National Security Agency] Director Michael Hayden signed off on a CIA-produced National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq’s WMD program that not only turned out to be wrong in almost all respects, but also served as the principal justification for the Bush administration to lead the United States to war with Iraq. The Top Secret Codeword NIE [which was released on October 1, 2002] was titled Iraq’s Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction. Virtually all its conclusions, major and minor, were later determined to be wrong. When congressional investigators began going through the raw intelligence reporting on which the NIE was ostensibly based, they discovered that there was little factual evidence to support any of the conclusions contained in the document, except for some very dubious reporting by defectors and refugees and extremely unreliable information provided by exile groups like Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress. Only the State Department formally dissented from some of the report’s conclusions, but its unwillingness to endorse the NIE carried little real weight.” [The 25th of the month used for date sorting purposes only.]
– Matthew M. Aid, The Secret Sentry, Page 236