Those hearings really show what any administration has to contend with in fighting an entrenched bureaucracy.
Forget about the Democratic senators; the fact that Ford (by his account, a conservative Republican) could go so ballistic because a senior official chose to "ream out" an analyst, and then hate him for it years later, shows how closed the system is.
At a time when transparency in government is repeated like a mantra (properly so, in my opinion), the intelligence community wants to treat its efforts like a closed, black box.
No wonder the Pentagon set up its own intelligence office under Doug Feith during the first George W. Bush administration. These recalcitrant, resentful, arrogant intelligence agents truly are frightening in the way that they close ranks. They are supposed to analyze data dispassionately, but yesterday's testimony by Ford was the most emotional display by a government official that I have ever seen.