http://www.tompaine.com/articles/corrupted_intelligence.phpRay McGovern, a CIA analyst for 27 years, is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
In our various oral and written presentations on Iraq, my veteran intelligence officer colleagues and I took no delight in sharply criticizing what we perceived to be the corruption of intelligence analysis at CIA. Nothing would have pleased us more than to have been proven wrong. It turns out we did not know the half of it.
Several of us have just spent a painful weekend digesting the report of the Senate Intelligence Committee on prewar intelligence assessments on Iraq.
The corruption is far deeper than we suspected. The only silver lining is that corrupter-in-chief George Tenet is now gone.When the former CIA director departed,
he left behind an agency on life support—an institution staffed by sycophant managers and thoroughly demoralized analysts, who are embarrassed at their own naiveté in believing that the passage carved into the marble at the entrance to CIA Headquarters—“You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free”—held real meaning for their work.
The Senate Committee report is meticulous. Its findings are a sharp blow to those of us who took pride in working in an agency
where we could speak truth to power—with career protection from retribution from the powerful, and with
leaders who would face down those policymakers who tried to exert undue influence over our analysis.more...well worth reading in its entirety