Stuart Buck points us to a quote from GOP Senator Charles Grassley that provides a rather different perspective than George Tenet’s:
�I think it�s legitimate for me to question all of our intelligence information because that I never learned anything from those briefings that I hadn�t learned in the newspapers. If they don�t know anything more than they�re telling us, what�s the use of having an intelligence agency, and why bother to brief us?�
There is some truth in that � the work of journalists is not dissimilar from that of spies � and it is valuable to understand the limitations of intelligence. However, one of the points I thought Tenet was making was that a lot of what later becomes common knowledge, available in open sources, was first discovered through intelligence-gathering.
From what I�ve read, about 80-90% of �intelligence� information comes from open sources anyway, but that last 10-20% is the most critical information, usually important enough to justify the extreme efforts that countries undertake in hopes of discovering it. Also, I think the country-specific expertise of intelligence analysts and their foreign service officer counterparts in the State Department generally serves an important government function.