[Al Jazeera] U.S. spy agencies "dead wrong" on Saddams WMDs

[No Worries]

U.S. spy agencies "dead wrong" on Saddams WMDs (http://www.aljazeera.com/cgi-bin/news_service/middle_east_full_story.asp?service_id=7619)

3/31/2005 2:45:00 PM GMT

A presidential commission released a report on Thursday slamming America's spy agencies for being "dead wrong" in most of their judgments about Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction before the invasion.

"We conclude that the intelligence community was dead wrong in almost all of its prewar judgments about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction," the commission said in a report to the president. "This was a major intelligence failure."

In its report, the commission also said that main cause of failure was the intelligence community's "inability to collect good information about Iraq's WMD programs, serious errors in analyzing what information it could gather and a failure to make clear just how much of its analysis was based on assumptions rather than good evidence.

"On a matter of this importance, we simply cannot afford failures of this magnitude," the report said.

The commission urged for a dramatic change to avoid similar failures in the future. It set more than 70 recommendations, and demanded that the U.S. President, George W. Bush give John Negroponte, the new director of national intelligence, more powers for overseeing the nation's 15 spy agencies.

It also called for major changes at the FBI to combine the bureau's counterterrorism and counterintelligence resources into a new office.

"The bad news is that we still know disturbingly little about the weapons programs and even less about the intentions of many of our most dangerous adversaries," the report said.

"Our review has convinced us that the best hope for preventing future failures is dramatic change," the report said. "We need an intelligence community that is truly integrated, far more imaginative and willing to run risks, open to a new generation of Americans and receptive to new technologies."

"It won't be easy to provide this leadership to the intelligence components of the Defense Department or to the CIA," the commissioners said. "They are some of the government's most headstrong agencies. Sooner or later, they will try to run around — or over — the DNI. Then, only your determined backing will convince them that we cannot return to the old ways," the commission said.

The commission released its 600 pages report after more than a year of work that included closed-door sessions with the U.S. president and senior administration officials.

In a classified portion, the report charges U.S. spy agencies of having done a poor job of developing sources to get credible information on the nuclear programs of North Korea and Iran.

Numerous intelligence failures have been detailed in several government reports since the Sept. 11 attacks. But this commission is the first formed by the President to study why the U.S. spy agencies concluded that the toppled Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, Washington’s key justifications for invading Iraq in March 2003.

Last year, another commission was formed by the U.S. President and led by Republican Laurence Silberman, a retired federal appeals court judge, and Democrat Charles Robb, a former senator from Virginia, as it became clear that U.S. weapons inspectors were not going to find any Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

Bush will discuss the report with Cabinet members today, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said.

"Making sure we have the best possible intelligence is critical to protecting the American people," McClellan said.

Senior intelligence officials have already started to soften the impact of the criticism, with the head of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which analyzes satellite imagery, telling the employees in an e-mail that they should "take on the lessons learned, and drive on."

"You may find the report difficult to read and you may not agree with the commission's analysis, opinions, or recommendations," retired Air Force Lt. Gen. James Clapper said. "I understand that it's much more difficult to be criticized rather than praised in public."

[JayZ750]

Dead Wrong...did they just a pun?

[MR. MEOWGI]

I am shocked.

[No Worries]

Damn Arabs should not be paying such close attention.

[Sishir Chang]

This is a tangent but I'm really curious No Worries why you keep on citing Al Jazeera as your source and even put that in the thread title?

The stories you're posting about have been widely reported and Al Jazeera is not the primary source. Is Al Jazeera the only agency you get your news from or are you trying to put a slant on this news based on the source?

[No Worries]

Originally posted by Sishir Chang
This is a tangent but I'm really curious No Worries why you keep on citing Al Jazeera as your source and even put that in the thread title?
Does the messenger or the message matter? I suspect the board wingnuts might care, but I am surprised you do.

[bnb]

The messenger adds credibility to the message. I too was surprised you credited Al Jazeera when I saw the exact same article on MSN.

In terms of the 'message' -- file this under "no-sh*t-sherlock"

Although blaming the intelligence community conveniently absolves those who acted upon that information -- and assumes that the information available (wrong as it may have been) gave justification for firing up the tanks.

I don't think we're all quite ready to agree on that.

[No Worries]

Originally posted by bnb
The messenger adds credibility to the message. I too was surprised you credited Al Jazeera when I saw the exact same article on MSN.
Are you surprised that Al Jazeera is not spinning the press release for their own purposes?

I will fess up. I posted the Al Jazeera article since it was nearly verbatum what is being carried by US mainstream news orgs, without any apparent bias. The lack of bias should surprise some here, me included btw. Al Jazeera has every right to bash the US in their coverage of this issue. They did not. That might indicate their English speaking audience do not need the bias (while their Arab audience does?)

[giddyup]

Why does Al Jazeera hate the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi citizens dead at the hands of Hussein and his nutty boys?

[No Worries]

Originally posted by giddyup
Why does Al Jazeera hate the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi citizens dead at the hands of Hussein and his nutty boys?
non sequitur

[giddyup]

Originally posted by No Worries
non sequitur
Ask the dead...

[No Worries]

Originally posted by giddyup
Ask the dead...
Calling John Edwards ...

[giddyup]

Originally posted by No Worries
Calling John Edwards ...
or do you mean John Edward (no S)?

[No Worries]

him too

[Sishir Chang]

Originally posted by No Worries
Does the messenger or the message matter? I suspect the board wingnuts might care, but I am surprised you do.

Just curious considering its something you've been doing a lot lately. I often post links to MSNBC because as an MSN slave my homepage is MSNBC so I often see news there first. I was wondering if Al Jazeera is your primary source.

[No Worries]

Originally posted by Sishir Chang
I was wondering if Al Jazeera is your primary source.
My primary news source is:

http://news.google.com/nwshp?gl=us&ned=us&topic=n

[Sishir Chang]

So why keep citing Al Jazeera?

[No Worries]

Originally posted by Sishir Chang
So why keep citing Al Jazeera?
I think I have cited them three times so far. I have probably sited NYT more often. As more for the reason I cited them recently, I mentioned that above.

[Sishir Chang]

Sorry about sidetracking your thread.

[glynch]

The major point should be that Bush-Cheny are ready to trash and destroy the CIA as an independent agency just to hide the fact that the CIA was largely right that the data was inconclusive or negiative on wmd, AL Qaeda-Sadam connections. It was only the cowardly George Tenet, , later paid off with a medal or two, who finally bent to the conclusions the Bu****es wanted.

[No Worries]

Originally posted by Sishir Chang
Sorry about sidetracking your thread.
No Worries.

[FranchiseBlade]

Al-Jazeera is not an unworthy news source. As this article shows, among others they do report the news, and it isn't all anti-American propoganda as some would have us believe.

I have seen articles from Al-Jazeera where they only interview or have quotes from one side of an issue, and in a news article that is definitely a no-no. But it certainly is no more biased than many of the American mainstream news agencies that are freely sourced around here. I think an article by article approach would be better than a blanket condemnation of the source.

[Rocket River]

Look . . . NO ONE CARES

The war is on . . .and if they lied to do it . . NO ONE CARES

9/11 changed everything
this Admin has free reign to do WHATEVER WHENEVER

Rocket River

[No Worries]

Originally posted by Rocket River
Look . . . NO ONE CARES
A majority of Americans who think that the war in Iraq was a MISTAKE might take issue with your statement..

[HayesStreet]

I heard an interesting point on npr this morning. With Enron, WorldCom, AIG etc the blame is going right to the top. With Iraq its going to 'the system.' That doesn't make much sense to me. And I'm no conspiracy theorist, I just think the administration ought to be held accountable for inspiring, if not demanding, groupthink on the WMD issue.

[RocketMan Tex]

In regards to intelligence during the run-up to the Iraq Occupation, the bottom line is that the Bush Administration got what they wanted, rather than what they needed. Any intelligence that didn't cater to their beliefs was either swept under the rug or ignored outright.

[bnb]

Originally posted by RocketMan Tex
In regards to intelligence during the run-up to the Iraq Occupation, the bottom line is that the Bush Administration got what they wanted, rather than what they needed. Any intelligence that didn't cater to their beliefs was either swept under the rug or ignored outright.

True dat...

...and now the great concession is to pin the blame on the bad information from the intelligence community rather than on the questionable judgements made with that info....

[subtomic]

An interesting, non-partisan take on the intelligence failure.

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/editorial/outlook/3117719

Bring a human touch back to intelligence gathering
By DAVID BROOKS


The years between 1950 and 1965 were the golden age of American nonfiction. Writers like Jane Jacobs, Louis Hartz, Daniel Bell and David Riesman produced sweeping books on American society and global affairs. They relied on their knowledge of history, literature, philosophy and theology to recognize social patterns and grasp emerging trends.



But even as their books hit the stores, their method was being undermined. A different group rejected this generalist/humanist approach and sought to turn social analysis into a science. For example, the father of the U.S. intelligence community, Sherman Kent, argued that social science and intelligence analysis needed "a systematic method," much like the method of the physical sciences.

Social research — in urban planning, sociology and intelligence analysis — began to mimic the hard sciences.

A new paper by a Yale undergraduate, Sulmaan Wasif Khan, contrasts these two ways of looking at the world. Khan compares the CIA's 1960s-era National Intelligence Estimates on China, which have been recently declassified, with the work of generalist scholars like Donald Zagoria.

The CIA's intelligence estimates are what you'd expect: bloodless compilations of data by anonymous technicians. They do not draw patterns based on an understanding of Chinese history or make generalizations about the ethos of the Chinese elite.

Zagoria's approach was quite different. Relying on a deep understanding of Chinese history and society, he made novelistic judgments about the Chinese leadership's hopes and fears. He imagined how we must appear to the Chinese, and how different American moves would be interpreted.

The CIA analysts concluded on Nov. 12, 1970, that there was little prospect of improvement in Sino-American relations. Zagoria said China would be open to a rapprochement.

Zagoria was right. Henry Kissinger was in China within months of the CIA report.

But the scientific method used by the CIA, and its technical jargon, can seem to have more authority (used to justify bigger budgets).

By now, academic analyses of society and world affairs are often quantitative, jargon-laden and hyperspecialized. Historical works have gigantic titles and minuscule subjects — think Power and Passion: Walloon Shovel Making, 1723-1724.

And we get decades of calamitous intelligence failures. Last week, the presidential panel on intelligence pointed to the same failings found by other reports. It said intelligence analysts "displayed a lack of imagination." They created artificial specialties — separating regional, technical and terrorism analyses. They built layers of hard analysis on fuzzy, impressionistic information.

This commission does what so many others have done. It tries to reorganize the bureaucratic flow charts to produce better results.

But the problem is not bureaucratic. It's epistemological. Individuals are good at using intuition and imagination to understand other humans. We know from recent advances in neuroscience, popularized in Malcolm Gladwell's Blink, that the human mind can perform fantastically complicated feats of subconscious pattern recognition. There is a powerful backstage process we use to interpret the world and the people around us.

When you try to analyze human affairs using a process that is systematic, codified and bureaucratic, as the CIA does, you anesthetize all of these tools. You don't produce reason — you produce what Irving Kristol called the elephantiasis of reason.

The capping irony is that Kent and the other pseudoscientists thought they were replacing the fuzzy old generalists with something modern and rigorous. But, in reality, intuitive generalists like Jacobs and Zagoria were more modern and rigorous than the pseudoscientific technicians who replaced them.

I'll believe the intelligence community has really changed when I see analysts being sent to training academies where they study Thucydides, Tolstoy and Churchill — to get a broad understanding of the full range of human behavior. I'll believe the system has been reformed when policy-makers are presented with competing reports, signed by individual thinkers, and are no longer presented with anonymous, bureaucratically homogenized bullet points that pretend to be the product of a scientific consensus.

I'll believe it's been reformed when there's a big sign in front of CIA headquarters that reads: Individuals think better than groups.

[jo mama]

Originally posted by RocketMan Tex
In regards to intelligence during the run-up to the Iraq Occupation, the bottom line is that the Bush Administration got what they wanted, rather than what they needed. Any intelligence that didn't cater to their beliefs was either swept under the rug or ignored outright.

mission accomplished

[lpbman]

Originally posted by HayesStreet
I heard an interesting point on npr this morning. With Enron, WorldCom, AIG etc the blame is going right to the top. With Iraq its going to 'the system.' That doesn't make much sense to me. And I'm no conspiracy theorist, I just think the administration ought to be held accountable for inspiring, if not demanding, groupthink on the WMD issue.

Thats nice you feel that way... but
Condi Rice who was caught up in lies about Iraq's WMD program in a white house press conference doesn't fall on the sword... she gets promoted to Sec. of State

the system is beyond broken

[FranchiseBlade]

Originally posted by lpbman
Thats nice you feel that way... but
Condi Rice who was caught up in lies about Iraq's WMD program in a white house press conference doesn't fall on the sword... she gets promoted to Sec. of State

the system is beyond broken And Wolfowitz who so badly planned things and made predictions so far off the mark, is now tapped to head the world bank.

[mc mark]

Originally posted by lpbman
Thats nice you feel that way... but
Condi Rice who was caught up in lies about Iraq's WMD program in a white house press conference doesn't fall on the sword... she gets promoted to Sec. of State

the system is beyond broken

And "Slam dunk" Tenet gets a Medal of Freedom.

[rhester]

Thats nice you feel that way... but
Condi Rice who was caught up in lies about Iraq's WMD program in a white house press conference doesn't fall on the sword... she gets promoted to Sec. of State

the system is beyond broken

There can be another answer no one is considering.

1. The U.S. intelligence agencies especially the CIA are incredibly accurate, have the highest efficiency and technology and capabilities in the world and plan things extremely well to meet their objectives and at the same time preventing detection of their operation, intentions and goals.
2. Under this senario the public perception that we were mistaken about the lack of WMD, would allow media attention and Congressional attention to follow this as a possibility for as long as possible. The charge of "poor communication" between agencies or other intelligence break downs is an easy way to pin blame for something that never really happened.
3. All of this would be necessary if the truth was we already new there weren't any WMD and that we would invade the country. These intentions were laid out in foreign policy outlined in the stategic publication- Rebuilding America's Defenses - Strategies, Forces and Resources For a New Century (http://www.newamericancentury.org/publicationsreports.htm) -- issued in September 2000 by the Project for the New American Century

Do a search on Project for the New American Century and you will find all the ground work being laid in 1999 for what is happening today in the middle east.

[mc mark]

rhester the neocons on the board wouldn't even look at that document in 2003 when we were really "debating" the merits of the war.

All you'll get now is "who cares."

[rhester]

mc mark- thats too bad,
I don't think Osama Bin Laden blows his nose without the CIA knowing about it.

Those guys are extremely intelligent and efficient and thorough.