Even without the many blacked-out sections of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s assessment of prewar intelligence, following any definite conclusion about Iraq’s capabilities is nearly impossible. The trail of seemingly conflicting evidence suggests that key elements of the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate were not supported by the facts, that an overseeing director is likely needed and that a review of conclusions about the military strengths of other countries is warranted.

One example of the problems could be seen in how the Intelligence Community presented the various assessments of Iraq’s chemical weapons programs. In 1996 and ’98, the CIA asserted that Iraq possessed a stockpile of chemical weapons and that it would be “poised to restart limited CW production after the departure” of U.N. inspectors. In December 2001, the Defense Intelligence Agency reported that Iraq has “100 metric tons of chemical agents or less in bulk storage and filled munitions.” But it added this caveat: “The nature and condition of this remaining stockpile are unknown.”

By the following September, the DIA sounds even less sure when it writes, “There is no reliable information on whether Iraq is producing or stockpiling chemical weapons, or where Iraq has – or will – establish its chemical warfare agent production facilities.” But just a month later, in the NIE, a text box lists the Intelligence Community’s confidence levels for selected judgments. Under “High Confidence” is, “Iraq is continuing, and in some areas, expanding, its chemical, biological, nuclear and missile programs contrary to U.N. resolutions.” As the Senate report notes, there were no assessments under moderate or low confidence.

The report is full of such examples, in which doubts and nuance in early assessments become simple assertions of fact by the time they are condensed in the NIE. Some of the reasons for this may be illuminated by the second half of the Senate committee’s investigation, which will examine the White House’s use of the information, but part of the reason for the failure has already been broadly discussed.

“It’s territorial,” according to Gen. Wesley Clark, former supreme commander of NATO, who also asserts that the weapons mentioned above were greatly diminished or eliminated after the U.S. bombings of Iraq in December 1998. “We’ve got to stop the quarrelling within intelligence.”

A way to do that, he says, and many senators, including committee member Sen. Olympia Snowe agree, is to appoint a high level director of national intelligence. That person, presumably, would treat all intelligence agencies impartially, unlike the current system, in which the director of the CIA also has the conflicting duty, but not the budget authority, of being responsible for the rest of the 14 intelligence agencies. It’s an idea that could work if the proper safeguards were in place to protect the job from political pressure.

The simple answer for what happened to thorough assessments in the NIE is that they were influenced by politics. But the Intelligence Committee should also wonder about the quality of the intelligence conclusions. For instance, earlier this month the CIA revised a previous estimate and stated it now believes North Korea is reprocessing spent nuclear-fuel rods into plutonium for weapons, it was reported.

Before Congress takes any action on this revised estimate it should ask many more questions than it has previously, and it should examine the intelligence that led to the reassessment.