American people deserve answers to WMD mystery

Is the Central Intelligence Agency totally inept, or did the administration pressure the CIA to provide intelligence that could be skewed to justify the invasion of Iraq? Either explanation has frightening implications.
The domestic implications are obvious. The American people have a right to know if the administration was less than candid in making its case for a pre-emptive invasion of Iraq.
Internationally, America's allies must be able to trust that when the most powerful nation in the world asserts that there is a need to go to war, it is doing so based on sound intelligence and analysis.
It is not enough to say, after the fact, as President Bush and his supporters are inclined to do, that the lack of evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq is irrelevant when weighed against the greater good that was accomplished, deposing Saddam Hussein
Reason to fight
Americans and the rest of the world were told that the United States was going to war because Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction and had active programs to produce more weapons and more sophisticated methods of delivering those weapons. As such, Saddam and his regime were a real and present danger to the United States and the rest of the free world.
Now, the United States' outgoing weapons inspector, David Kay, says emphatically that, "The weapons do not exist."
It appears that the U.N.-led inspections program, much derided by the Bush administration, actually worked. By the end of 1991, Iraq's nuclear program had been dismantled and its chemical weapons largely destroyed. In the mid-1990s, the West learned, via a defector, of a germ warfare program but by then the Iraqis had destroyed their biological weapons on their own. When the inspectors were allowed back in 2002, after a four-year absence, they found no evidence that the programs had been restarted.
At home, Saddam remained a vicious monster, but internationally, he was a toothless tiger.
Interviewed on NPR the other day, Kay was asked whether he thought Bush owed an explanation to the American people. "I actually think the intelligence community owes the president, rather than the president owing the American people," he said.
It's not that simple. If the intelligence was as bad as Kay implies, heads should roll at CIA headquarters. But President Bush has not demanded accountability, and that should raise questions. If the CIA caused the president to send American troops into battle unnecessarily, why would President Bush hesitate to fire CIA Director George J. Tenet?
Commission proposal
President Bush says he will appoint a bipartisan commission to conduct a careful study of the CIA's prewar failures -- as well as its performance in the rest of the Middle East and in Korea. The word most often used in describing the inquiry is "broad."
If the administration had a track record of candor, that might sound reasonable. But given this administration's penchant for secrecy -- an inclination that predated Sept. 11, 2001 -- no one should feel comfortable with anything less than a fully independent and sharply focused investigation.
The White House has wrapped a cloak of secrecy around former presidents' papers, around the formulation of its own energy policy, around its detention of hundreds of suspicious aliens and "enemy combatants." It has been less than forthcoming in an investigation of an apparent White House leak of the name of a former CIA gent to a newspaper columnist, and it has denied access to information to another bipartisan commission conducting an inquiry into events that led up to the attacks of Sept. 11.
The American people should demand an honest inquiry into how and why a president could receive such terribly flawed information as that used by President Bush to take the nation to war.