The Senate report put to rest at least two other Bush "lies," concluding there was no evidence that the Bush administration pressured intelligence analysts to link al-Qaida and Iraq. Or that Bush sought to "coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgments related to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capabilities."

Which is not to say the report is without criticism for the administration. In one particularly damning section highlighted by Newsweek's Michael Isikoff, an Iraqi defector nicknamed "Curve Ball" was apparently the source of information about mobile biological labs that Secretary of State Colin Powell cited in his 2003 address to the United Nations making a case for war.

Curve Ball, it seems, was a drunk Iraqi defector of dubious credibility, who met once (while tending a terrible hangover) with one Pentagon analyst, who determined that the man was useless as a source.

Of course, being occasionally overserved doesn't necessarily make one unreliable. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant was known to imbibe enthusiastically. When someone criticized him to President Lincoln, the president urged finding out what he drank and providing it to the other generals.

It nevertheless seems likely that a case could be made for some degree of willful ignorance within the Bush administration, a preference for information that fits a preconceived notion of how things ought to go. Even so, does selective cognizance constitute intentional deceit?

Another question worth considering is, what would we have had Bush do post-9/11 given the information he had?

With 3,000 dead on American soil and the world's best intelligence agencies suggesting that Saddam Hussein - a known mass murderer who previously had used WMD - had stockpiles of biological weapons and was trying to buy uranium for the possible production of nuclear weapons, would anyone wish that Bush had ignored the intelligence and merely prayed that it was wrong?

Given that some of it was right - and given Saddam's history of ill intent - such luxury of speculation might not have been ours.