Suspicions that most of us have had about the CIA under George W. Bush are confirmed by a recent study by the Brookings Institution.  It finds that analysts at the CIA were rewarded for having their reports included in the President’s Daily Brief and that their findings were more likely to make it into the brief if they were perceived to be of the sort that attracted presidential interest, meaning in Bush’s case items like “evidence” that Iraq had WMDs.  One carefully worded Brookings conclusion, as reported by Walter Pincus of the Washington Post:

Focusing on producing PDB items that would draw favorable comment from Bush could have skewed ‘topic selection and treatment in the analytic community.’

Translated from Brookingspeak, this means they gave Bush what he wanted to hear.

Reprinted from The Washington Monthly by permission.

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