Phil said:

"Like the State Dept, the CIA is peopled with Ivy League grads with an Eastern upper class elite cultural bias. That worldview and massive groupthink has prevented the CIA from being effective. Look at "missing" the fall of the Soviet Union. Upper echelon managers who do not share the Ivy culture are sorely needed. The FBI has made progress in diluting it's predominately Mick Catholic culture with needed other perspecives."

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I can't argue with this. However the CIA has a deeper problem in being a secret organization tasked with destablizing governments. This is intrinsic to the CIA. We had a taste of this problem during the recent presidential election when CIA analysts were selectively leaking informiation to the MSM in the hope of influencing the election's outcome. This recent misconduct was the action of a few individuals violating their employment contracts and secrecy oaths. Now imagine it was company policy of the CIA to influence presidential elections and you can see how dangerous the CIA could be.

I would argue that producing low quality information is also intrinsic to the CIA. The basis for scientific advance is peer review. A person can not (or should not) publish in a scientific journal any old random rubbish that pops in his head. With scientific publications, peer review is the process for evaluating information and rejecting invalid material. The CIA tries to do peer review, secretly in-house but the process is obviously faulty. The CIA relies too much on unverifiable sources such as expatriates, traitors and foreign intelligence agencies. I would argue that the President would be better informed by a small team (30 people) of Ph.D. level poltical and social scientists who research the open literature, daily cruise the internet and actually lived in the regions of interests (speak and read the local language!!!). These people should be publicly known and required to frequently publish in the open literature their opinions about world affairs. Each of these expert advisors should have a blog on the Internet with a lively comments section. The basis of the information that they provide to the President should be a matter of public discussion and open to criticism and correction.

Gary