The CIA And The War

THE CIA AND THE WAR....Jonathan Schwarz has been reading The Italian Letter by Peter Eiser and Knut Royce and finds himself amazed. "I really can't understand why this hasn't gotten some attention," he says via email. In particular, he's amazed at this passage about Alan Foley, the head of the CIA's Weapons Intelligence Non-Proliferation and Arms Control Center (WINPAC), which led the CIA's analysis of Iraqi WMD:

One day in December 2002, Foley called his senior production managers to his office. He had a clear message for the men and women who controlled the output of the center's analysts: "If the president wants to go to war, our job is to find the intelligence to allow him to do so." The directive was not quite an order to cook the books, but it was a strong suggestion that cherry-picking and slanting not only would be tolerated, but might even be rewarded.