Mark Steyn on the CIA

He paints a grim picture of our intelligence. One point that stuck out to me was this:

The CIA, as I wrote a couple of years back, now functions in the same relation
to President Bush as Pakistan's ISI does to General Musharraf. In both cases,
before the chief executive makes a routine request of his intelligence agency,
he has to figure out whether they're going to use it as an opportunity to set
him up, and if so how.

I think there's some truth in that. Regardless of who the president is, many of the government institutions - like the CIA, the Pentagon or the State Department, etc., are made up of career individuals that were there before an administration and will be there after an administration. These people often do not share an administration's goals.