Right Question - 4 Years too Late

Greg Miller, in the LA Times (reg. Required) reports that the CIA weapons search team will be "using a timeline as a tool for analysis". This makes more sense than the previous story which reported that the CIA would project whether Saddam Hussein would have had weapons by 2006 or 2008. Had the CIA released such a report, the administration would have been defending itself against charges of premature preemption.

Before the war started, I wrote my Senators and representatives, saying that the administration had not shown the immanence of an WMD threat by the Iraqi military. On Feb. 3, 2003, I wrote the WaPo about the lack of timeline analysis, saying:

“it is unclear whether the administration analyzed Iraqi programs in terms of milestones. Administration statements (including the October 2002 NIE) do not show that the Iraqi military had tested, deployed and trained to use WMD in the past decade. Therefore, the military threat did not seem imminent.”

A timeline analysis, however, would have not resolved uncertainties about an Iraqi supported low-level terrorist attack with WMD’s.

I hate to sound peevish but in the 1980’s the intelligence community knew how to analyze weapons R&D programs. scroll down to document 28, here for an example. Did they forget?