Yesterday upon the stair
I met a man who was not there
He wasn’t here again today
How I wish he’d go away.

That classic children’s rhyme seems to be the theme of the American intelligence community; the Department of Homeland Security; and the excuse Chicken George is advancing to explain how he and Dugout Dick were able to assure us that Iraq’s fearsome weapons were justification to launch the Second Iraqi War. We were warned that the man who wasn’t there yesterday would be back tomorrow and we had better be afraid of him. Things changed forever on September Eleventh and we did not want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.

Oops! It seems that it was all a mistake. It turns out that there was nobody on the stair yesterday and the only mushroom on horizon was in the soup we had last night for dinner. The intelligence that there was a man upon the stair yesterday was faulty. The man upon the stair was not there, but it would have been irresponsible not to consider the danger that he posed. Besides, he would not have been upon the stair unless he intended something evil. So the fact that it has developed that he was not upon the stair does not mean that we were wrong to go to war to drive him from the stair. It is all so clear that we relied upon faulty intelligence. We sure will know better than to rely on faulty intelligence now that we learned that.

Yesterday Secretary of Homeland Security Thomas Ridge announced that the United States had received intelligence that Bin Laden’s Al Qaida was planning to use aircraft to attack targets in the United States. This time there were no plans to go to Orange Alert as we did in response to the same quality intelligence received in September and again at Christmas. It seems that this time we are considering the possibility that there is no man upon the stair today. But, remember, he would not be on that stair at all unless he intended us evil. We had better act as though the intelligence we receive is accurate and there is a man upon the stair, after all he wasn’t there again today and he sure as hell won’t go away!