Back during 2002 and early 2003 it was near-universally understood that there was conflict between the top leadership of the Bush administration and the bulk of the CIA over Iraq and Iraq-related intelligence. After all, before the push for war began the CIA issued a January 2002 tour de horizon of the global proliferation situation and offered a pretty anodyne assessment of the Iraqi nuclear threat: “Iraq has probably continued at least low-level theoretical R&D associated with its nuclear program.” Since back during this period the bulk of Washington was backing the war, the common assumption was that the CIA was deliberately understating the threat thanks to the CIA’s legendary pacifism.

But then of course it turned out that the CIA had actually been somewhat overstating Iraq’s WMD capabilities and the administration has been wildly overstating the intelligence plus doing some exaggerating, distorting, etc. on the side. At which point suddenly poor Bush became the victim of a CIA and it was all their fault. The story never made much sense, but unfortunately enough powerful people had agreed with Bush about invading Iraq that few really wanted to peer too deeply into this. But here comes a new memo from Henry Waxman and the House Government Oversight Committee kicking another brick out of the wall.

This one concerns the bogus Niger “yellowcake” claims. On behalf of Condoleezza Rice, several years back Alberto Gonzales assured congress that the mistaken claims in Bush speeches had been cleared with the CIA, and the CIA signed off. Not so — Matt Corley guides you through the new information:

When White House speechwriters tried to put the uranium claim into Bush’s Sept. 12, 2002 speech to UN, the CIA rejected it because it was “not sufficiently reliable to include it in the speech”:

During an interview with the Committee, John Gibson, who served as Director of Speechwriting for Foreign Policy at the National Security Council (NSC), stated that he tried to insert the uranium claim into this speech at the request of Michael Gerson, chief White House speechwriter, and Robert Joseph, the Senior Director for Proliferation Strategy, Counterproliferation, and Homeland Defense at the NSC. According to Mr. Gibson, the CIA rejected the uranium claim because it was “not sufficiently reliable to include it in the speech.” Mr. Gibson stated that the CIA “didn’t give that blessing,” the “CIA was not willing to clear that language,” and “[a]t the end of the day, they did not clear it.”

When National Security Council staff refused to take the uranium claim out of Bush’s Sept. 26, 2002 speech, Jami Miscik, the Deputy Director of Intelligence at the CIA, called Rice personally to request it be removed:

According to Ms. Miscik, the CIA’s reasons for rejecting the uranium claim “had been conveyed to the NSC counterparts” before the call, and Dr. Rice was “getting on the phone call with that information.” Ms. Miscik told Dr. Rice personally that the CIA was “recommending that it be taken out.” She also said “[i]t turned out to be a relatively short phone call” because “we both knew what the issues were and therefore were able to get to a very easy resolution of it.”

But, you know, democracy whiskey sexy.

With apologies, this is a pampered elites only bulletin of no interest to regular people.

That said, this morning I saw someone refer to a large number of Obama appointees as having MPP degrees from HKS. Since I recognized some of the names as having HPP degrees from the Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, I immediately thought that the person in question had slipped and revealed his non-elite cards by using the wrong acronym. As I well remember, the way the acronyms work is that we have FAS (Faculty of Arts and Sciences), HLS (Harvard Law School), HBS (Harvard Business School), and KSG (Kennedy School of Government) there’s no HKS. Naturally I leapt to the interwebs to verify my assertions and found that they changed the acronym. The website formerly located at http://ksg.harvard.edu has moved to http://hks.harvard.edu and so on and so forth.

The upside to this change is that it conforms to the HLS/HBS acronym pattern. The downside is a loss of logic. HLS teaches about law. HBS teaches about business. Which implies that HKS teaches about the Kennedy family. Which would be an intriguing thing to do, but seems like an unduly narrow mission even if you add the Dead Kennedys into the mix.

Spencer Ackerman offers the ultimate Ron Blagojevic rap:

The advent of modern digital technology makes this sort of creative fun possible, but the copyright lobby wants to make it illegal.

Virginia Postrel writes about the mass psychosis that leads to asset price bubbles. She observes that there’s an experiment that’s commonly conducted over the past couple of decades wherein you get a bunch of volunteers together and you give them some money and “shares” to trade. In one version of the experiment, the shares are given a fixed dividend value of 24 cents. In other versions, there’s an equal chance of getting 0, 8, 28, or 60 cents, which averages out to 24 cents. But either way, since “the fundamentals” in this artificial equity market are known, and known by all, and known by all to be known, the value of the shares ought to swiftly converge to a stable, fundamentals-based value. And then there’s the real world:

Again and again, in experiment after experiment, the trading price runs up way above fundamental value. Then, as the 15th round nears, it crashes. The problem doesn’t seem to be that participants are bored and fooling around. The difference between a good trading performance and a bad one is about $80 for a three-hour session, enough to motivate cash-strapped students to do their best. Besides, Noussair emphasizes, “you don’t just get random noise. You get bubbles and crashes.” Ninety percent of the time.

All a reminder that we’re probably never going to develop policies that totally prevent asset bubbles. We need to focus on better ways to unwind the bubbles. And we also need to focus more on social justice issues and less on the farcical notion that unduly high taxes on the wealthy financiers who make up an incredibly large share of the rise if hyper-inequality will somehow impede the “efficiency” of the economy.