In Sketchy Data, White House Sought Clues to Gauge Threat
By James Risen, David E. Sanger and Thom Shanker for the NY Times.
(William J. Broad and Don Van Natta Jr. also contributed to this article.)

“Once the inspectors were gone, it was like losing your G.P.S. guidance,” added a Pentagon official, invoking as a metaphor the initials of the military’s navigational satellites. “We were reduced to dead reckoning. We had to go back to our last fixed position, what we knew in ’98, and plot a course from there. With dead reckoning, you’re heading generally in the right direction, but you can swing way off to one side or the other.”
Condoleezza Rice, Mr. Bush’s national security adviser, said today that the question of new evidence versus old was beside the point. “The question of what is new after 1998 is not an interesting question,” she said. “There is a body of evidence since 1991. You have to look at that body of evidence and say what does this require the United States to do? Then you are compelled to act.
“To my mind, the most telling and eye-catching point in the judgment of five of the six intelligence agencies was that if left unchecked, Iraq would most likely have a nuclear weapon in this decade. The president of the United States could not afford to trust Saddam’s motives or give him the benefit of the doubt,” she said.
In a series of recent interviews, intelligence and other officials described the Central Intelligence Agency and the White House as essentially blinded after the United Nations inspectors were withdrawn from Iraq in 1998. They were left grasping for whatever slivers they could obtain, like unconfirmed reports of attempts to buy uranium, or fragmentary reports about the movements of suspected terrorists.

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/20/international/worldspecial/20WEAP.html
In Sketchy Data, White House Sought Clues to Gauge Threat
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
his article was reported and written by James Risen, David E. Sanger and Thom Shanker.
WASHINGTON, July 19