They say that history repeats itself. And so it does.

  Two years ago the Central Intelligence Agency released reams of intelligence documents on the former Soviet Union that had been classified for nearly 30 years. The findings were damning: the CIA for more than 10 years greatly exaggerated the nuclear threat the communist country posed to the world.  

The late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Raymond Garthoff, a longtime C.I.A. military analyst, admitted in 2001 "there were consistent overestimates of the threat every year from 1978 to 1985."  

Fast forward to 2003 and the CIA finds itself in a similar pickle. This time it's intelligence on Iraq's alleged stockpile of chemical and biological weapons and the country's nuclear ambitions appear to be in doubt. Two months have passed since major combat in Iraq has ended and those weapons of mass destruction, the reasons the U.S. launched a preemptive strike against Iraq, are nowhere to be found.  

  Media critics often say that visual images trump words. The claim makes some sense: Pictures have major impacts on how we see the world. And we’re apt to pay less attention to photo captions or the voice-overs that accompany news footage on TV screens.

     But when images meet the eye, our reactions depend on our sense of context. The same news outlets that select certain photos and video snippets also influence how we look at what we see. The pictures can have political clout because of prevalent assumptions and attitudes largely shaped by media.

     Many people reacted strongly to President Bush’s “top gun” imitation when he jetted onto an aircraft carrier near San Diego a couple of months ago. Bush fans and pliable journalists swooned. More skeptical observers noticed the shameless manipulation. But everyone was looking at identical images. The determining factor was not the choreography of the photo-op but the outlooks of those who watched.

     Let’s say a magazine photograph, taken in a war zone, shows a mother holding a baby covered with blood. Two people -- looking at the

CPT team members Peggy Gish, Maureen Jack and Anne Montgomery travelled an   hour north of Baghdad on the road to Tikrit to visit the uncle of a friend of the team who had recently been imprisoned.  

At 6.00 am one morning he, his wife and five young children were awakened from sleep by a megaphone. Their house was surrounded by a number of army   vehicles and two helicopters.  The soldiers said that they were looking   for a senior member of Saddam's regime, who they had been told was hiding   there.  The children saw them as they pointed their weapons; they were   frightened and crying.  The soldiers found and removed a significant sum   of money.  They handcuffed the owner of the house and two memb! ers of his   extended family.  They said that they would hold them for an hour and then   release them; about a kilometer along the road they freed the other two,   but they took the owner of the house to prison and held him there for   twelve days.

In prison there were 80 men in the same room; they had blankets but no   beds.  There were two outside toilets, which seemed to be open, without