INTEL HOAX, REDUX
Kevin is “actually starting to feel sorry for the CIA these days.” He ponders whether “Congress [is] really going to let the Bush administration get away with making the CIA the scapegoat for” the WMD fiasco. Actually, the quotation Kevin cites charges that the Pentagon–presumably under pressure from Rumsfeld and Co.–deliberately distorted the CIA analysis. I’m skeptical of this, but it’s one hell of a charge if it can be proven. Indeed, it would be impeachable. I’ll need a lot more evidence than a vague Newsday story.
Kevin often lets his blind partisanship get in the way of common sense. All 15 countries on the security council voted on a resolution saying he had WMD.
So, if we believe Kevin and his ilk, 13 of those countries were simply wrong expect the U.S. and the U.K. who knew he really did not have WMD but lied about it so we could invade.
Somehow the liberals find that infinitely more plausible that the possibility that after learning to hide these weapons for 12 years they actually hid them well.
To follow Kevin’s and others insanely tortured logic, Saddam himself does not exist….
After all we have not found him, so Bush must have lied, there never was a Saddam Hussein.
The CIA has institutional problems and procedures that often produce “consensus” analysis that is less insightful than one might hope, despite having some of the best individual analysts in the world.
David Brooks addressed this problem to an extent here:
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2003/01/brooks.htm
And I used his column as a taking off point to share a related experience here:
http://www.reductioadabsurdum.net/blog/index.php?itemid=1196
DoD IS looking to dig deeper than the typical CIA analysis, but they aren’t looking to replace CIA or its information gathering capabilities. That’s part of what Steve Cambone’s new office is charged with doing. And Doug Feith hints at that here (not that some folks ever bother actually to read all of the transcripts available at DoD):
http://defenselink.mil/transcripts/2003/tr20030604-0248.html
American intelligence and ANALYSIS is not all that it could be. A little competition on the analysis side within DoD (and DIA) might well help things (much as the Team B experiments shook things up, albeit only temporarily). Of course, those who disagree will drop charges of it being “political” — but many of those (if not most) will tend to be people who have no clue about American intelligence/policy in the first place.
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