Bush's Bad Intelligence - Stovepipe by Seymour Hersh

[demnan]

I've seen this referred to but not link over the last few days. I read it last night in the New Yorker. It's a must read.

<snip>
The point is not that the President and his senior aides were consciously lying. What was taking place was much more systematic—and potentially just as troublesome. Kenneth Pollack, a former National Security Council expert on Iraq, whose book “The Threatening Storm” generally supported the use of force to remove Saddam Hussein, told me that what the Bush people did was “dismantle the existing filtering process that for fifty years had been preventing the policymakers from getting bad information. They created stovepipes to get the information they wanted directly to the top leadership. Their position is that the professional bureaucracy is deliberately and maliciously keeping information from them.

“They always had information to back up their public claims, but it was often very bad information,” Pollack continued. “They were forcing the intelligence community to defend its good information and good analysis so aggressively that the intelligence analysts didn’t have the time or the energy to go after the bad information.”
</snip>

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

[JHB]

1. And a nice related piece by Robert Parry

CIA analysts have pieced together the real story but can’t get it to the president. “The president is basing his decisions on some really bad information,” analyst Jack Ryan (Ben Affleck) pleads to a U.S. general. “My orders are to get the right information to the people who make the decisions.”

Though a bit corny, Ryan’s dialogue captures the credo of professional intelligence analysts. Solid information, they believe, must be the foundation for sound decisions, especially when lives and the national security are at stake. The battle over that principle is the real back story to the recent dispute over Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction. It is a story of how the CIA’s vaunted analytical division has been corrupted – or “politicized” – by conservative ideologues over the past quarter century.

Some key officials in George W. Bush’s administration – from Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz to Vice President Dick Cheney – have long been part of this trend toward seeing intelligence as an ideological weapon, rather than a way to inform a full debate. Other figures in Bush’s circle of advisers, including his father, the former president and CIA director, have played perhaps even more central roles in this transformation.

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2003/102203.html

[elfin]

2. My FAVORITE magazine

Go to USS - University Subscription Services to get a good discount - this is one weekly mag that all DU would enjoy having come to their homes.

[Woodstock]

3. kick

hopefully this won't sink out of sight this fast, like most important articles do (it seems only the sensational threads stay afloat)

:kick:

[ModerateMiddle]

4. kick

We just read this article, and though it is very long, it really is important.

Read it.

:kick: