Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Still Broken After All These Years

Has there been any worse Bush administration trait than corrupting intelligence gathering by suborning it for political and propagandistic purposes?

Yes there has, but that will do in the context of yet another book making its way toward Kiko’s House by snail mail -- Still Broken: A Recruit's Inside Account of Intelligence Failures, from Baghdad to the Pentagon by A. J. Rossmiller.
Rossmiller, moved deeply by the 9/11 attacks, joined the Defense Department's Intelligence Agency in 2004 after getting a degree in Middle East Studies and volunteered to join a DIA unit in Iraq.

There he said U.S. forces were repeatedly handicapped by bad or outdated intelligence and he and his peers were under enormous pressure to cook their reports if they were too pessimistic. If they failed to do so, their superiors did so anyway.
It should come as no surprise that the result was devastatingly low morale.

More here on Still Broken.

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