“Tell me what you know, then tell me what you don’t know, and only then can you tell me what you think. Always keep those three separated.”

— Colin Powell to Mike McConnell, summer 1990, as reported in Lawrence Wright, A Reporter at Large: The Spymaster, The New Yorker, January 21, 2008

The article’s well worth reading and quite scary, I thought, both for the incompetence of the “intelligence community” and the frightening steps McConnell wants to take to make it effective, but I loved directness and efficiency of Powell’s advice.