If I have the sequence of events correct:
• Shaun Waterman reports that Judge Laurence H. Silberman told officials that they would resign from the Presidential commission investigating intelligence failures regarding WMD. The federal judge, co-chair with former senator Chuck Robb was appointed in February of 2004.
• WaPo writer Walter Pincus quotes a CIA e-mail concerning an Iraqi émigré inelligence source named CurveBall."Let's keep in mind the fact that this war's going to happen regardless of what Curve Ball said or didn't say, and that the Powers That Be probably aren't terribly interested in whether Curve Ball knows what he's talking about. However, in the interest of Truth, we owe somebody a sentence or two of warning, if you honestly have reservations." This was on July 13, 2004.
• Newsweek’s Michael Issikof interviews Judge Silberman and asks about the “Powers That Be” and reports: “Yet the new panel conspicuously omitted the "Powers That Be" e-mail that appeared in the Senate report. In fact, commission leaders seemed to not even know of its existence. "What e-mail are you talking about?" Judge Lawrence Silberman, the chairman, testily responded when asked by a NEWSWEEK reporter why it wasn't included in the report. "I'm mystified." Two hours later, after NEWSWEEK supplied the panel with a copy of the e-mail from the Senate report, a commission spokesman explained that the panel was aware of it but chose not to include it because its contents were already known. But its absence from the report raises questions of whether the Silberman panel may have "cherry-picked" evidence to exclude anything politically embarrassing to the "Powers That Be." This was on April 14, 2005.
Based on the public record, it is doubtful that the threat to resign produced it’s intended result. Apparently the commission knew about the “Powers that Be” e-mail but the judge did not. Somebody overestimated the Iraqi WMD threat and refused to pass dissenting information up the chain of command. The fact that the e-mail would use a circumlocution to describe that person (or persons) indicates that that somebody is very high in the Chain of Command.
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