And what did he think his intelligence agencies knew about Iraqi WMD?

Several intriguing questions are raised by a story in today's New York Times, which reports that the White House is refusing to give Senate investigators the one-page "President's Summary" of the CIA's 2002 National Intelligence Estimate dealing with Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

The first question: The "President's Summary" was one page? This CIA estimate was a 93-page document, filled with caveats, qualifiers, and footnotes of interagency dissent on several key points. It would take a dedicated master of pith to whittle the NIE's findings and equivocations to a single page. (By the Times' account, the summarizer didn't bother with the equivocations.)

Which leads to the second question: Who wrote this summary? And what position had he or she taken on the estimate's controversies?

In graduate school, I had a professor who had served on several top-secret national security panels over the years. The way he bolstered his own influence on these panels, he told me, was always to volunteer for the sub-panel that wrote the report. That way, he could shape which points were emphasized and which points were not.

Both of these questions are ancillary to the main question here: What did the president know about Iraqi WMD—or, more to the point, what did he think (or what was he led to think) his intelligence agencies knew?

This is why the Senate Intelligence Committee wants the summary released. It's the same reason the 9/11 commission wanted the White House to release the president's daily intelligence briefing of Aug. 6, 2001 (the one headlined, "Bin Laden Determined To Strike in U.S."). They want to know what the president knew. Did he have reason to see Osama Bin Laden's attack coming—and, if so, should he have done something about it? Did he know about internal disputes over the evidence of Iraqi weapons programs—and, if so, should he have thought twice about going to war?

If all George W. Bush knew about the Iraqi threat was gleaned from a one-page summary that stated the case for WMD—and that did not even acknowledge the existence of a case for skepticism—that's important to know. It's important for citizens who want some insight on why we went to war. And it's important for the president, who may decide to read a longer document the next time there's trouble.

Perhaps no president can be expected to read a 93-page document. (Some presidents would have, though. Bill Clinton was an inveterate reader of intelligence reports. Jimmy Carter once asked to see the engineering blueprints for the KH-11 photoreconnaissance satellite. The latter is a case of a control freak gone too far.) Still, the president's summary should stretch beyond the margins of a single page—at least when the fate of nations is at stake.

A National Intelligence Estimate is not an ordinary report. It marks the one occasion when the Central Intelligence Agency warrants its name, acting as a central entity that pulls together the assessments of all the myriad intelligence departments, noting where they agree and where they differ. Most NIEs are produced on an annual basis. Occasionally, the CIA is asked to produce what used to be called a "special" NIE. The 2002 estimate in question, titled "Iraq's Continuing Program for Weapons of Mass Destruction," was such a document. It was ordered so that the president could decide, in an informed manner, whether to go to war. The president is the main consumer of the NIE; it is written entirely for his benefit. To shrink the thing into a single page—to remove all distinctions between certainty and guesswork—is to evade the whole point.

Would Bush have acted any differently if he'd known that the State Department's intelligence branch thought Iraq had imported aluminum tubes for purposes other than building centrifuges? Or that Air Force Intelligence thought Iraq's drones were unsuitable for spraying chemical or biological weapons? Or that several agencies were far less sure than others that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program? Maybe not. But a president at least should be told of such things. And citizens should know whether he was told—or wanted to be told—of such things.