Spy Work in Iraq Riddled by Failures

[liveoaktx]

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/latimests/spyworkiniraqriddledbyfailures

A pair of British-recruited spies in Iraq (news - web sites), whose alarming reports of Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s illicit weapons were rushed to the White House shortly before the U.S.-led invasion last year, were never interviewed by the CIA (news - web sites) and are now viewed as unreliable, current and former U.S. intelligence officials say.
The CIA's reliance on the two Iraqis, who were recruited by Britain's MI6 in late 2002 and thought to have access to Hussein's inner circle, is the latest example to come to light of the failures in human intelligence gathering in Iraq. U.S. agencies were also beset by broader, more systemic problems that included failures in analyzing communications intercepts and spy satellite images, the officials interviewed by The Times said.

....
In Washington, the Senate Intelligence Committee is poised to issue a verdict on what most experts describe as a sweeping intelligence failure by U.S. agencies.


Officials said the committee's still-secret report, based on interviews with 200 intelligence analysts and officials, details major mistakes and misjudgments in collection and analysis by the CIA, the National Security Agency, the Pentagon (news - web sites)'s Defense Intelligence Agency and other U.S. intelligence agencies

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Here we go for another nail in Bush's political coffin

[denverbill]

1. That's why we want to start spying on people in the US.

We can't do shit anywhere else, so we're going to start spying on our own people instead.

[Larkspur]

2. That's because the CIA and Pentagon are hoping that

practice makes perfect. They need to practice on us to hone up for the bad guys abroad.

So the new post 9-11-01 Patriotic motto is, "Go shopping and enjoy being spied on."