The New Repub­lic has a long arti­cle by John B Jud­is & Spencer Ack­er­man detail­ing the sub­ver­sion of the intel­li­gence agen­cies to the polit­i­cal agen­da of the pro-war hawks in the Bush Admin­is­tra­tion. The job of the Cen­tral Intel­li­gence Agency is to pro­vide the U.S. with cred­i­ble infor­ma­tion on threats to nation­al secu­ri­ty. Sub­vert­ing it to fit a polit­i­cal agen­da is the real threat to nation­al security.

“Had the admin­is­tra­tion accu­rate­ly depict­ed the con­sen­sus with­in the intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty in 2002 – that Iraq’s ties with Al Qae­da were incon­se­quen­tial; that its nuclear weapons pro­gram was min­i­mal at best; and that its chem­i­cal and bio­log­i­cal weapons pro­grams, which had yield­ed sig­nif­i­cant stocks of dan­ger­ous weapons in the past, may or may not have been ongo­ing – it would have had a very dif­fi­cult time con­vinc­ing Con­gress and the Amer­i­can pub­lic to sup­port a war to dis­arm Saddam.”