Jonathan Freedland (Guardian Unltd): Why gather intelligence?

[Jack Rabbit]

From the Guardian Unlimited (UK)
Dated Wednesday September 24

Why gather intelligence if our leaders deliberately ignore it?
What Hutton reveals is the corruption of the security services
By Jonathan Freedland

Until Kelly, most people assumed that government security decisions were based on intelligence. Yet Hutton has shown that, in the Iraq case, it was the other way around.
First came the decision - to make war on Iraq - and next came the search for evidence. Why else would Scarlett's bosses have ordered him to drop his inquiries into North Korea and Iran and focus solely on Baghdad? If they were genuinely interested in assessing the most pressing threat to security, they would have waited to hear which state posed the chief menace. But the government's mind had already been made up.
The pattern is not confined to Britain. Our coalition partners were up to the same tricks. In the US, too, the working method was conclusions first, evidence later. Democratic presidential candidate and former general Wesley Clark has told how he was phoned on 9/11 by "people around the White House" urging him to blame the attacks on Saddam Hussein. Never mind the lack of proof, it was the end goal that mattered.
If London and Washington had been truly interested in what their intelligence services had to say, they might have drawn very different conclusions. In October 2002 the CIA concluded that Saddam posed little threat - and was only likely to strike at the US if attacked first. Britain's own intelligence chiefs warned this February that al-Qaida remained the greatest danger to western interests "and that threat would be heightened by military action against Iraq". But neither of these assessments fitted the policy that had already been decided, and so they were ignored.

Read more.

[T_i_B]

1. First the decision, then the dossier

Similar article to the Freedland one by a former minister who resigned over Iraq.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1030406,00.html

What Hutton has exposed is that neither the dossier nor the intelligence assessment was designed to inform government decisions on Iraq. The real assessment had already been made by the government, and the intelligence community was asked to provide evidence to support it.

The government's real mistake was to persuade the public, media, parliament (and perhaps even itself) that the intelligence would support decisions that had already been taken. Instead of setting out the real reasons for these decisions, the government wanted us to believe it all stemmed from the intelligence assessment. Of course it didn't, and arguably it never could have done. Even if Saddam had a far more extensive weapons programme, our intelligence would still be hedged with "ifs" and "buts". Intelligence is like that: unreliable, capable of many interpretations and a matter of cautious judgment. It will rarely prove a case. The government's first action in restoring credibility must be to promise that the intelligence services should never be asked to do so again.