AlterNet: Goodbye To Intelligence: "Few have more at stake in the expected Senate approval of John Bolton to be U.S. representative at the U.N. than the remnant group of demoralized intelligence analysts trained and still willing to speak truth to power. What would be the point in continuing, they ask, when--like so many other policymakers--Bolton reserves the right to 'state his own reading of the intelligence' (as he wrote to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee)?

Given his well-earned reputation for stretching intelligence beyond the breaking point to 'justify' his own policy preferences, Bolton's confirmation would loose a hemorrhage of honest analysts, while the kind of malleable careerists who cooked intelligence to 'justify' the administration's prior decision for war on Iraq will prosper. I refer to those who saluted obediently when former CIA director George Tenet told them, as he told his British counterpart in July 2002, that the facts needed to be 'fixed around the policy' of regime change in Iraq"

(Via AlterNet.)