Questionable Intelligence Used to Attack Those Who Questioned the Intelligence

The Washington Post reports that Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald has described a "concerted action" in the White House to discredit critics of the intelligence used to take us to war. The ringleader?

Bluntly and repeatedly, Fitzgerald placed Cheney at the center of that campaign. Citing grand jury testimony from the vice president's former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Fitzgerald fingered Cheney as the first to voice a line of attack that at least three White House officials would soon deploy against former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV.

The New York Times reports that the intelligence that President Bush authorized Scooter Libby to leak was precisely that which was being disputed inside the intelligence apparatus:

A review of the records and interviews conducted during and after the crucial period in June and July of 2003 also show that what the aide, I. Lewis Libby Jr., said he was authorized to portray as a "key judgment" by intelligence officers had in fact been given much less prominence in the most important assessment of Iraq's weapons capability.
Mr. Libby said he drew on that report, the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, when he spoke with the reporter. However, the conclusions about Mr. Hussein's search for uranium appear to have been buried deeper in the report in part because of doubts about their reliability.

The concerted effort was designed to impune the credibility of those who questioned the relentless march to war. Now it's the credibility of those leading us to war that is at an all time low.