Today's development:

Tenet ... rejected suggestions that political pressure influenced the CIA's assessment of Iraq, saying "We will always call it as we see it."

"Unfortunately, you rarely hear a patient, careful or thoughtful discussion of intelligence these days," he said during a speech at Georgetown University. "But these times demand it, because the alternative -- politicized, haphazard evaluation without the benefit of time and facts -- may well result in an intelligence community that is damaged and a country that is more at risk."

Once again, and this time actually putting the country "at risk", I will attempt a "haphazard evaluation". The notion that an absence of overt political pressure constitutes an absence of any political pressure is flatly idiotic. Anyone with even a passing familiarity of the politics of coercion is aware that power laid bare is often power on the verge of collapse. In Washington, as in other circles where power is king, merely having possession of the purse strings, or a potentially ruinous morsel of political dirt, will usually suffice as sufficient leverage to tip the scales in your direction. As David Kay has rightfully acknowledged, the decision to go to war (while influenced by the available data) was a political decision. To assert, given the absence of U.N. inspectors and therefore the shortage of reliable data, that the intelligence assessments were not "politicized" is likewise idiotic; at least insofar as such an assertion extends to the White House.

As I have noted previously, the National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002 presented a radically new perspective on the WMD issue in the absence (actually characterized a "decrease") of reliable intelligence. However, Bruce Blair has constructed a more compelling argument for the failure of intelligence than merely the existence of political pressure, which can never be dismissed as a motivating force behind data evaluation techniques – the policy of preemption itself cannot be supported by current intelligence-gathering capabilities. There are natural limits to what CIA (or any other agency) can do in this regard.

A list of criticisms of the current U.S. preemptive strategy could run for pages. Its defects range from its dubious legitimacy under international law, to the bad example it sets for other countries eager to justify a preemptive or preventive attack on their neighbors. Already we have seen Russia and France follow in the U.S. footsteps to declare similar doctrine for themselves, and the list of emulators will undoubtedly grow.

High on this list of liabilities is one particular difficulty that is the focus of this essay: the enormous burden that preemption places on intelligence – not only intelligence collection and analysis, but its interpretation by those at the top who, as noted earlier, inevitably filter the intelligence information they receive through their own presumptions. The buck stops at a level at which leaders must fuse incoming intelligence with their own prior beliefs. It is crucial to the shaping of U.S. security policy that this highly subjective process be understood well. Intuition suggests that human intellectual and psychological limitations undercut the feasibility and sensibility of a preemptive strategy.