An Astonishingly Awesome Piece About WMD Intelligence from The New Yorker

[Composed Thinker]

ANNALS OF NATIONAL SECURITY

THE STOVEPIPE
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
How conflicts between the Bush Administration and the intelligence community marred the reporting on Iraq’s weapons.

Issue of 2003-10-27
Posted 2003-10-20

Since midsummer, the Senate Intelligence Committee has been attempting to solve the biggest mystery of the Iraq war: the disparity between the Bush Administration’s prewar assessment of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and what has actually been discovered.

The committee is concentrating on the last ten years’ worth of reports by the C.I.A. Preliminary findings, one intelligence official told me, are disquieting. “The intelligence community made all kinds of errors and handled things sloppily,” he said. The problems range from a lack of quality control to different agencies’ reporting contradictory assessments at the same time. One finding, the official went on, was that the intelligence reports about Iraq provided by the United Nations inspection teams and the International Atomic Energy Agency, which monitored Iraq’s nuclear-weapons programs, were far more accurate than the C.I.A. estimates. “Some of the old-timers in the community are appalled by how bad the analysis was,” the official said. “If you look at them side by side, C.I.A. versus United Nations, the U.N. agencies come out ahead across the board.”

There were, of course, good reasons to worry about Saddam Hussein’s possession of W.M.D.s. He had manufactured and used chemical weapons in the past, and had experimented with biological weapons; before the first Gulf War, he maintained a multibillion-dollar nuclear-weapons program. In addition, there were widespread doubts about the efficacy of the U.N. inspection teams, whose operations in Iraq were repeatedly challenged and disrupted by Saddam Hussein. Iraq was thought to have manufactured at least six thousand more chemical weapons than the U.N. could account for. And yet, as some former U.N. inspectors often predicted, the tons of chemical and biological weapons that the American public was led to expect have thus far proved illusory. As long as that remains the case, one question will be asked more and more insistently: How did the American intelligence community get it so wrong?

Part of the answer lies in decisions made early in the Bush Administration, before the events of September 11, 2001. In interviews with present and former intelligence officials, I was told that some senior Administration people, soon after coming to power, had bypassed the government’s customary procedures for vetting intelligence.

A retired C.I.A. officer described for me some of the questions that would normally arise in vetting: “Does dramatic information turned up by an overseas spy square with his access, or does it exceed his plausible reach? How does the agent behave? Is he on time for meetings?” The vetting process is especially important when one is dealing with foreign-agent reports—sensitive intelligence that can trigger profound policy decisions. In theory, no request for action should be taken directly to higher authorities—a process known as “stovepiping”—without the information on which it is based having been subjected to rigorous scrutiny.

http://newyorker.com/fact/content/?031027fa_fact

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There's clearly a huge problem with our intelligence services.

[kimchi]

1. Juicy tidbit...

.... What if it turns out that Ahmad Chalabi is not so popular? What’s Plan B if you discover that Chalabi and his boys don’t have it in them to accomplish the overthrow?”

The people in the policy offices didn’t seem to care. When the official asked about the analysis, he was told by a colleague that the new Pentagon leadership wanted to focus not on what could go wrong but on what would go right. He was told that the study’s exploration of options amounted to planning for failure. “Their methodology was analogous to tossing a coin five times and assuming that it would always come up heads,” the official told me. “You need to think about what would happen if it comes up tails.”

(Faith-based intelligence, anyone?)

[Mountainman]

2. I sometimes wonder why we spend so much time and money

researching what we already know.

Bush lied to get us into war. How much research does it take to find that out. It was premeditated by PNAC. Planned way before the 2000 selection.

Will someone please stand up and recognize the 10,000 lb gorilla in the room?

[Flying_Pig]

3. This was an excellent piece. One would think, that with this piece

appearing, the 60 Minutes II piece last week, andthe Nightline story, that Bush would be facing some serious questions from the media (ha ha). Apparently, the media, and most of Congress, including quite a few Dems, are willing to give the regime a pass. Apparently, in 2003, it's OK to lie your ass off to the nation, start a phony war, kill tens of thousands, while spending hundreds of billions doing it, and no one will suffer any repercussions.

Twilight Zone time. They should all be tried for treason, and receive the highest punishment prescribed by law.

[Composed Thinker]

4. How do you respond to this?

http://www.musil.blogspot.com/2003_10_12_musil_archive.html#106623894525185307