From the Big Tent mailbox (Cali edition), on the difficulties of dealing with intelligence:

"Kenneth Pollack, director of research for the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution and former Persian Gulf military analyst for the CIA, National Security Council from 1995-96, 1999-2001, author of The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq, published in 2002 and author of the recent aritcle in the Atlantic, 'Spies, Lies, and Weapons: What Went Wrong' in which he criticizes the Bush Administration for overplaying certain WMD reports from Iraq and ignoring others, has this to say about public opinion and foreign policy:

'Another step worth considering is forbidding the CIA or anyone else in government from making any intelligence estimates public for five or ten years. As someone firmly committed to the concept of open government, who believes that the CIA has benefitted from its efforts in the past decade to be more open to the public, I dislike the idea of greater secrecy. However, when intelligence estimates become public, they have a huge impact on the course of foreign policy debates, and administrations therefore find themselves with a great incentive to make sure the Agency's estimates supprt the Administration's preferred policy. If such estimates were not made public, an administration would have little reason to try to influence them.'"