In particular, it excoriates the CIA under George Tenet's leadership for sacrificing the agency's independence and what Risen calls its “gravitational force”—its ability to draw policy-makers away from mistaken or dangerous ideas and towards the agency's presumably more accurate view of the world—by yielding to the relentless pressure that the administration placed on it.
..........
..... Risen vividly details how, in the hope of restoring the CIA to prominence, Tenet bound himself to Bush. Charmed by Tenet's gregariousness and towel-snapping machismo, Bush asked him to stay on as Director of Central Intelligence, thus denying Donald Rumsfeld the job.
Tenet made a Faustian bargain. Risen observes that in national security debates, the intelligence community, like the bureaucracy as a whole, “does serve one purpose: It tends to weed out really stupid or dangerous ideas, unethical and even immoral ideas, ideas that could get people killed or could even start wars.” But with Tenet betting the agency's status in the Bush administration on appeasing Bush, its independence—and therefore its potential to mitigate the self-deceptions to which any administration is vulnerable—was completely compromised. What's more, Tenet's pandering to Bush was actually counterproductive to maintaining the CIA's bureaucratic status: The CIA would quickly learn that in the hands of a radical administration, no amount of appeasement would ever suffice.
The effects manifested quickly. Risen charges that Tenet caved to Bush entirely on the torture of al-Qaeda detainees. After the 2002 capture of Abu Zubaydah, a bin Laden deputy, failed to yield much information due to his drowsiness from medical treatment, Bush allegedly told Tenet, “Who authorized putting him on pain medication?” Not only did Tenet get the message—brutality while questioning an enemy prisoner was no problem—but Tenet also never sought explicit White House approval for permissible interrogation techniques, contributing to what Risen speculates is an effort by senior officials “to insulate Bush and give him deniability” on torture. CIA operatives watched apprehensively, remembering the long history of presidents who authorize covert actions only to leave low-level field agents holding the bag when scandals surface.
Once Tenet supplicated himself to Bush—one of Tenet's former aides terms his old boss “a pussy”—the CIA was in no position to exert its influence on the policy toward Iraq. Pressure to ratify the invasion took a variety of forms, and Risen details them richly. When Hadley, now the national security adviser, instructed Tenet's deputy, John McLaughlin, “that the agency had to get over its dislike of
Chalabi,” the Iraqi exile politician and neoconservative favorite who provided dubious Iraq intelligence to policymakers, “McLaughlin made it clear to Hadley that the CIA wouldn't stand in the way and passed the White House message back to CIA management.” Similarly, when Paul Wolfowitz complained about the CIA's rejection of the debunked “connection” between Saddam and al Qaeda, an ex-Pentagon official tells Risen, “George would say that he would fix it.”
In Risen's telling, Tenet “fixed it” vigorously. When senior CIA officials, fearful that invading Iraq would jeopardize the war on terror, took their concerns to Tenet, “He would just come back from the White House and say they are going to do it” no matter what, one ex-official tells Risen. As he writes, “Agency officials who appeared to be unenthusiastic about Iraq soon mysteriously found themselves sidelined, while their more eager and ambitious colleagues began to rise.” A 2002 CIA meeting became a “pep rally” for the war: “The pressure from the Bush administration was being transmitted directly into the ranks of the nation's intelligence community.”
CIA appeasement only emboldened its enemies. Here lies the difference between previous administrations and Bush's. While no policymaker accepts the CIA's judgments uncritically, neither did any of Bush's predecessors seek to cripple the agency outright. In an incident detailed in the Senate report, Jami Miscik, head of CIA analysis, pulled the agency's Mideast experts, who were dubious of an Iraq-al Qaeda connection, off an assessment of those ties entirely, leaving it to the more credulous terrorism analysts. But when even those analysts were constrained by the facts—the paper was sub-headlined “Assessing a Murky Relationship”—the Pentagon's Douglas Feith had his analysts prepare a briefing for senior officials arguing that CIA skepticism should be ignored. The briefing, which sought to highlight “Fundamental Problems with How Intelligence Community is Assessing Information,” suggested that the administration should shunt the CIA to the side on any issue in which it expressed inconvenient doubts.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2006/0603.ackerman.html
since I can't see the video, let me know if I'm off base here, but the idea that Tenet ever lifted a finger (in the final analysis) against these creeps just doesn't wash. He did everything they asked him to, then got the blame 
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