An interesting read by a former CIA case officer. At the end of her short career, she made this comment in the wake of 9/11 and in the run-up to the Iraq War:
During my short tenure in Iraqi Operations, I met one woman who had covered Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program for more than a decade. She admitted to me, unequivocally, that the CIA had no definitive evidence whatsoever that Saddam Hussein's regime possessed WMD, or that Iraq presented anything close to an imminent threat to the United States.
Another CIA analyst, whose opinion I'd solicited about the connection between Al-Qa'ida and Iraq, looked at me almost shamefacedly, shrugged, and said, "They both have the letter q?" And a colleague who worked in the office covering Iraqi counterproliferation reported to me that her mealy-mouthed pen pusher of a boss had gathered together his minions and announced, "Let's face it. The president wants us to go to war. Our job is to give him a reason to do it."
http://www.booksite.com/texis/scripts/oop/click_ord/showdetail.html?sid=1624&isbn=0399152393&music=&buyable=0&assoc_id=