October 21, 2003

Wanted: Good Intelligence

Sy Hersh has a new article in the New Yorker which pretty much confirms what many have thought: the Bush Administration heard only the intelligence it wanted to hear and ignored that which it didn't. "...the new Pentagon leadership wanted to focus not on what could go wrong but on what would go right." It ignored an analysis of its assumptions which attempted to determine what might happen if those assumptions were proven to be wrong.

Chalabi’s defector reports were now flowing from the Pentagon directly to the Vice-President’s office, and then on to the President, with little prior evaluation by intelligence professionals.

[snip]

A routine settled in: the Pentagon’s defector reports, classified “secret,” would be funnelled to newspapers, but subsequent C.I.A. and INR analyses of the reports—invariably scathing but also classified—would remain secret.

There's quite a lot of detail in this article, particularly about Niger and documents purporting to prove that Iraq had attempted to buy uranium there. There's also the tantalizing and terrifying idea that some of those documents (which have been shown to be forged) were actually created by CIA personnel in order to trip up the Administration. If that's true, and Hersh says the story is making the rounds at Langley, this country's intelligence gathering system is clearly out of whack; no matter how angry CIA was at the people misusing or ignoring its work, forging documents to make the Administration look bad was unprofessional and potentially calamitous.

Posted by Linkmeister at October 21, 2003 12:01 AM
Comments

unconscionable.

treason? would "treason" be too harsh a word?

Posted by: shelley at October 21, 2003 01:13 AM

I heard an interview with Hersh on "All Things Considered" last night. He thinks that someone made up the Niger stuff, planning on it coming up as embarrassing someone like the VP in a meeting, never dreaming it would be used as a prime excuse for the war. "How could anyone be that stupid?" they reasoned. DOH!

Posted by: Solonor at October 21, 2003 01:33 AM

Gee, it's not exactly surprising but doesn't it make you wonder about what else was made up? Or better yet--doesn't it make the administration wonder? Hmmm, probably not, huh? The world gets a little spookier every day.

Posted by: ali at October 21, 2003 08:41 AM

Yes, and there's plenty more good stuff in this editions of Frontline. I pointed out a few key things a while back.

Posted by: john@linkworthy.com at October 21, 2003 09:17 AM