These guys need to spend less time taking shots at each other and focus on Tenet and Powell.

Peter Feaver's essay in the Weekly Standard is much more useful contribution to the debate.

I'm thinking of emailing him directly. He wrote, "Despite strenuous efforts, war critics have not come up with well-substantiated cases of the administration saying something that it knew was not true or had no evidentiary basis for believing was true. Of course, there are many cases of the administration saying things that turned out to be not true. But moving the public from "you were lying" to "you were mistaken" would be significant progress. And moving it all the way to "you had understandable reasons for your policy" could be game-changing."

I think he is doing exactly what the administration did in 2002: deliberately making HALF a strategic argument. A complete argument is not simply saying "X is a threat" but to say that "the threat from X justifies the costs and risks of dealing with it using method Y."