Cherry Picking
Intelligence, Policy, and the War in Iraq by Paul R. Pillar in the March/April 2006 issue of Foreign Affairs.
Summary: During the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, writes the intelligence community’s former senior analyst for the Middle East, the Bush administration disregarded the community’s expertise, politicized the intelligence process, and selected unrepresentative raw intelligence to make its public case.
So why didn’t Mr. Pillar say something sooner? How about: because no one was willing to listen.
The New York Times sat on the NSA story for a year. A host of media figures have been commenting on the Valerie Plame case while failing to mention that they were involved. Only after they helped the Shrubbery get re-elected did the media finally wake up to what a mess they had foisted on the country with their failure to report what they knew. The media are complicit in every failure that has plagued the American people, from Iraq to Katrina. They were enablers.
Finally, the media is taking small steps back to reporting the news, but not to the point that it bothers their corporate overseers.
Read Mr. Pillar’s article and understand that the intelligence community wasn’t broken or wrong until the Shrubbery’s thugs, Negroponte and Goss, started pushing out the pros and replacing them with cronies, just as they have done at every Federal agency.
