I don't have time to respond to everything but I will try tomorrow. In the meantime, one of your cited news articles is without a doubt in conflict with official investigations. The one about Chaney and Administration officials "pressuring" analysts.
This is the source your cited:
washingtonpost.com: Some Iraq Analysts Felt Pressure From Cheney Visits
These claims are DIRECTLY rebutted by the
Report of the Select Committee on Intelligence on the U.S. Intelligence Community’s Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq:
Congressional Reports: Report of the Select Committee on Intelligence on the U.S. Intelligence Community’s Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq
See section 9
Bot surprising. Nor does it mean it is inaccurate.
This was in the Post article:
. . . . creating an environment in which some analysts felt they were being pressured to make their assessments fit with the Bush administration's policy objectives, according to senior intelligence officials.
As was this:
Other agency officials said they were not influenced by the visits from the vice president's office, and some said they welcomed them. But the disclosure of Cheney's unusual hands-on role comes on the heels of mounting concern from intelligence officials and members of Congress that the administration may have exaggerated intelligence it received about Iraq to build a case for war.
It is inaccurate to confuse two different things. I doubt Cheney was overt in his pressure, thus not finding anything they could charge him with, particularly with republicnas controlling both congress and the presidency at the time. However, as the visits are not in dispute, and we know that what he was questioning, again and again, was their assessment, and that this is how Curveball, al Libi, and Chalibi and his heros in error got into the final report as accepted intel, if we're crticial thinkers and nto tools, we have to question this beyond the offical report.
Again, as I have stated, pressure isn't the point. Bush got good intel, he just didn't use it. He presented intel as if there were no doubts, using the intel that was doubted. As long as you focus on pressure as being the only way this could happen, you miss the point completely.
Similarly, the President himself said this in a speech to the nation, just three days before the House vote to authorize force:
Bush, Oct. 7, 2002: We've learned that Iraq has trained al Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases . And we know that after September the 11th, Saddam Hussein's regime gleefully celebrated the terrorist attacks on America.
Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists. Alliance with terrorists could allow the Iraqi regime to attack America without leaving any fingerprints.
That statement is open to challenge on two grounds. For one thing, as we've seen, the intelligence community was reporting to Bush and Congress that they thought it unlikely that Saddam would give chemical or biological weapons to terrorists – and only "if sufficiently desperate" and as a "last chance to exact revenge" for the very attack that Bush was then advocating.
Furthermore, the claim that Iraq had trained al Qaeda in the use of poison gas turned out to be false, and some in the intelligence community were expressing doubts about it at the time Bush spoke. It was based on statements by a senior trainer for al Qaeda who had been captured in Afghanistan. The detainee, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, took back his story in 2004 and the CIA withdrew all claims based on it. But even at the time Bush spoke, Pentagon intelligence analysts said it was likely al-Libi was lying.
According to newly declassified documents, the Defense Intelligence Agency said in February 2002 – seven months before Bush's speech – "it is . . . likely this individual is intentionally misleading the debriefers. Ibn al-Shaykh has been undergoing debriefs for several weeks and may be describing scenarios to the debriefers that he knows will retain their interest. . . . Saddam’s regime is intensely secular and is wary of Islamic revolutionary movements. Moreover, Baghdad is unlikely to provide assistance to a group it cannot control." The DIA's doubts were revealed Nov. 6 in newly declassified documents made public by Democratic Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, a member of the Intelligence Committee.
FactCheck.org: Iraq: What Did Congress Know, And When?
In the case of al-Libi, however, the Bush administration was only too glad to make use of the "take" from al-Libi's interrogation, helpfully provided by Egyptian intelligence. Under questioning by the Egyptian authorities (techniques unknown, but not hard to imagine), al-Libi confessed that Al Qaeda terrorists, beginning in December 2000, had gone to Iraq to learn about chemical and biological weapons. This was just the evidence the Bush administration needed to make the case for invading Iraq and getting rid of Saddam Hussein. In his famous, now discredited speech to the United Nations in February 2003, the then Secretary of State Colin Powell cited the intelligence extracted from al-Libi, referring to him not by name but as a "senior Al Qaeda terrorist" who ran a training camp in Afghanistan.
There was only one problem with al-Libi's story: after the Powell presentation, he recanted it. Overlooking timely doubts raised by some U.S. intelligence officials, particularly at the Defense Intelligence Agency, the ideologues in the Bush administration had used information obtained by torture to mislead the world.
The Debate Over Torture - Newsweek
As I keep telling you, there is much to read on this, and frankly, you should know this stuff, being involved in a site like this. Nothing is new here.