The newest post at Liberal Oasis reminded me of this bit from last week’s press conference about the senate Intelligence committee’s report on prewar intelligence :

ROCKEFELLER: And we had major disagreements on pressure. And I felt that the definition of pressure was very narrowly drawn in the final report. And that is that, sort of, that if somebody came up to you and you were one of the analysts who had been working on WMD, and they said, “Did anybody tell you that you had to change your point of view?” and the answer was, “No,” well that was the description of pressure.

That?s not my description of pressure. That?s a description of pressure. But another description of pressure is the total ambience of this cascade of ominous statements, which continued really up to the present, about what was going to happen or the relationship between Al Qaida and Iraq, Mohammed Atta and the rest of it.

So, to me, pressure also can be defined by what else is in our additional views. And that is that George Tenet indicated that he was approached by analysts from the CIA. Going to the director?s office? If you?ve ever done that, it?s, sort of, intimidating.

And they came to him and he said, to relieve the pressure, “Simply don?t answer the question if there is no new information.” But the key phrase there is “to relieve the pressure.” He was agreeing, assenting to the fact that there was.

The ombudsman of the Central Intelligence Agency, whose job it is for people to come to with their complaints, a veteran of many years there, said that the hammering on analysts was greater than he had seen in his 32 years of service to the Central Intelligence Agency, and he was referring to pressure.

And the former deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Robert Kerr (ph), had a group which did analysis of this within the CIA, and he also came up with the same conclusion, that the pressure was there, it?s always internal to the analysts and it was external in the whole ambience, the whole sense of what the nation was moving toward, what the policy-makers were in fact moving toward, except that we couldn?t discuss that in our report.

And what did the final report conclude about this “pressure”? (via Matt Yglesias)

“No, we’ve got nothing to hide. Honest…”