Secret Obsessions at the Top: "When a country's capital is in the grip of hard-line ideologues who demand a certain kind of intelligence, they'll get it. The result is an intelligence failure. And, more fundamentally, it's a political failure by the top leaders themselves.
So to me, the administration's recent effort to blame the intelligence community for the Iraq mess is as misleading as the drive to war itself. Nothing the C.I.A. did was as harmful as the way administration officials systematically misled Americans about the incomplete and often contradictory mountain of intelligence.
For example, in September 2002 the Defense Intelligence Agency issued a still-classified report saying 'there is no reliable information' on whether Iraq had chemical weapons. Yet in the same month Donald Rumsfeld was telling a House committee the opposite: 'We do know that the Iraqi regime currently has chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction, and we do know they are currently pursuing nuclear weapons.'"
- posted by geoff @ #