Who's gonna take the fall for lousy intelligence?

Walter Pincus and Dana Millbank on the musical chairs blame game going on in Washington these days. It's not pretty. But the more the issue remains front and center, the worse it has to be for Busheney. Blaming faceless, nameless CIA drones for launching a war and disastrous occupation will be hard for people to swallow for long.

Meanwhile, Joseph Wilson's credibility takes a hit in the Intelligence report according to the Post's Susan Schmidt.

Schmidt's credibility takes a massive hit here.

Susan Schmidt is known, happily among DC Republicans and not so happily among DC Democrats, as what you might call the "Mikey" (a la Life Cereal fame) of the DC press corps, especially when the cereal is coming from Republican staffers.

This morning she has an article on the Senate intel report and Joe Wilson, specifically focusing on the relevance of Wilson's reporting on Niger (the report says analysts did not see Wilson's findings as weakening claims that Iraq had sought to purchase uranium from Niger) and his wife's role in recommending him for the assignment.

We'll discuss the broader issues of Plame's role in Wilson's assignment and the underlying question of the alleged Iraq-Niger negotiations. A clearer-eyed take on Wilson and report can be found here in this story by Knight Ridder. But for now a few points on Schmidt's treatment.

In her fourth paragraph Schmidt writes that "contrary to Wilson's assertions and even the government's previous statements, the CIA did not tell the White House it had qualms about the reliability of the Africa intelligence that made its way into 16 fateful words in President Bush's January 2003 State of the Union address."

This is one of those cases in which it's helpful to actually read the report rather than just run with what you've got from the majority committee staffer who gave you the spin.