Uri Avnery: Bush, Blair and Intelligence Snafus: "The intelligence services do indeed look for facts, but mostly for the facts that suit their political bosses. They submit reports to governments, but woe betide the service chief whose report does not suit their agenda. In short, there is hardly an intelligence report that is not trimmed to suit the powers that be, that does not twist the facts or is not an outright lie. That explains the successive failures of the intelligence agencies in almost all countries and in almost all"

"Every intelligence chief has a political boss--a President, Prime Minister, Secretary of Defense, Home Secretary. His career depends on the boss, and so do the chances of advancement of his underlings. When the boss appoints the service chiefs, he chooses people who are close to his political agenda. In time, the whole intelligence service becomes an apparatus for supplying the boss with the information he wants to hear and suppressing less agreeable information. That is true not only in dictatorships like those of Stalin, Hitler and Saddam, but also in most democratic regimes. The successful intelligence chief is an acrobat who walks between the raindrops and knows how to adapt the intelligence data to the interests of the political leadership."

Wisdom here from Avnery but I think he is not appreciating how the uproar over the WMD lie in the Anglo-Saxon world in fact represents the serious disquiet in upper levels of the coporate/political elite about the risks and dangers of neo-conservative policy. If not for that disquiet, the matter could simply be dropped in the memory hole as has happened so often before.

Uri Avnery: Bush, Blair and Intelligence Snafus: "The intelligence services do indeed look for facts, but mostly for the facts that suit their political bosses. They submit reports to governments, but woe betide the service chief whose report does not suit their agenda. In short, there is hardly an intelligence report that is not trimmed to suit the powers that be, that does not twist the facts or is not an outright lie. That explains the successive failures of the intelligence agencies in almost all countries and in almost all"

"Every intelligence chief has a political boss--a President, Prime Minister, Secretary of Defense, Home Secretary. His career depends on the boss, and so do the chances of advancement of his underlings. When the boss appoints the service chiefs, he chooses people who are close to his political agenda. In time, the whole intelligence service becomes an apparatus for supplying the boss with the information he wants to hear and suppressing less agreeable information. That is true not only in dictatorships like those of Stalin, Hitler and Saddam, but also in most democratic regimes. The successful intelligence chief is an acrobat who walks between the raindrops and knows how to adapt the intelligence data to the interests of the political leadership."

Wisdom here from Avnery but I think he is not appreciating how the uproar over the WMD lie in the Anglo-Saxon world in fact represents the serious disquiet in upper levels of the coporate/political elite about the risks and dangers of neo-conservative policy. If not for that disquiet, the matter could simply be dropped in the memory hole as has happened so often before.