Extra Readings for Chapter 9

Senate Select Committee on Intelligence

This article reports on the 500-page document that criticizes the US intelligence community. The document states that the community was "group thinking" and was based on a system of communal agreement rather than a more aggressive system of challenging assumptions and arguing conclusions in order to get more detailed and supported analyses. This seems to be the system that was in place at the time, but I would of like to hear a discussion of how they American Intelligence community had slipped into a system of lowered expectations on the quality of intelligence out overall, and how the system was weakened to begin with. I would bet that this slippage in the system was built up over years or decades of Senate and Congressional Committees chipping away at the ability of the intelligence community to actually affectively gather quality information, until by 2000+ the information coming out of these areas from the UN was better than the information the very few operatives that the CIA had on the ground could provide.