Not my fault! It was a collective failure

I found this article after deciding to write about how pathetic it is for Bush and Blair to pawn off responsibility for the intelligence failures, and it pretty much made my points.  Any time there's a collective failure in an organization, the real failure is in the leadership of the organization, or in its expected role, dictated from on high. 

Looking at the CIA, imagine that you're a CIA officer.  And imagine that you're also a longtime Republican that has supported the work that men like Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney have done over the years.  Now also consider that you find out that both Cheney and Rumsfeld have 'hunches' (that you therefore wholeheartedly believe) that Saddam is reconstituting his nuclear program and was working with Al Qaeda.  As a go-getter that wants to impress the guys up top, you scurry around finding anything you can to support their hunches (i.e. doing your job).  Now consider that you have a significant portion of CIA (which obviously has many Republicans in its ranks) that is also swept up in the frenzy of brown-nosing as well.  Also, keep in mind that in England, all of this is happening as well. 

What do you end up with?  You end up with uncorroborated data (the Atta-Prague meeting, the 45 minute deployment crap) ending up becoming evidence to support a war, and you end up with intelligence chiefs unable to discern between circumstancial evidence and reality because of the one-sided zeal of the reports (no one looked more perplexed than Tenet at times upon hearing new evidence that was coming out).  And you end up with two countries convincing each other of a truth because they were each individually influenced to think the same way.  This was not a failure of our ability to collect intelligence, it was a failure of our ability to analyze it.  And that comes from a lack of interest in getting to the truth.  And that failure comes from one place.   The top.