Mr. Drogin bends over backwards to make it seem as if the Curveball fiasco was just one of those things, an institutional foul up. He goes out of his way to deny "conspiracy" theories imputing deliberate lies to the White House. This would seem to be one of those cases where a journalist's determination to avoid charges of partisanship, to seem "balanced," compels him to distort reality.

If the CIA fed Curveball's crappy intel to Cheney/Bush in the October 2002 NIE, it was because the White House had explicitly rejected previous reports casting doubt on Saddam's WMD. Tenet was simply giving POTUS what it wanted; that, indeed, was what Dick Cheney had been after when he paid repeated visits to Langley throughout the summer and fall of 2002 - pounding the table, rejecting expert analysis, demanding incriminating "evidence" against Saddam.

And if Judy Miller was a "victim" of her sources, then she's a remarkably stupid woman. Dealing with an operator like Chalabi, someone whose notoriety absolutely requires informed skepticism, there's no excuse for credulity. Her willing, nay, calculating, even self-promotional gullibility when faced with such "sources" make it impossible not to consider her complicitous in the Administration's misinformation campaign. A reporter must be willing to verify, question and challenge her sources. When she refuses to do her job with a minimum of professional self-respect, the only "victims" are her readers.

Shutting people up makes one morally responsible for any falsehoods that result. Mr. Drogin is overly concerned with the idea that someone who was "just doing their job" might be unfairly tarnished with blame. In the case of Curveball, whose tendency to drink and make up stories was already well known before the invasion, there's no point in making it sound as if George Bush and his accomplices (including Miller) were somehow innocently duped into accepting bad statements by confused CIA careerists. The political leadership had demanded that a certin kind of "intel" be forthcoming by any means necessary and their bullying produced bespoke intelligence. The story Colin Powell told at the UN in February 2003 was not the result of some tragic miscue, but a deliberately designed lie.

I thought the column was called "how the world works"? So what I really need from Mr. Leonard is an explanation of Countrywide's plan to "rescue" some 80,000+ mortgages from default. How do you go about that, unless it's just a matter of canceling the original loan contract with the mortgagees, according to which the original loan was going to re-set at an unmanageably higher rate, and giving the home buyer a new mortgage at a lower rate? And if that's still possible at this point in the crisis, why wasn't it possible three years ago when credit was generally easier and rates lower? Doesn't Countrywide's willingness to re-negotiate doomed mortgages now indicate the extent to which they (and the mortgage industry generally) have been ripping people off all these years?

Or maybe I'm being too literal minded. You tell me, Mr. "How it Works"!