TCS Daily – An Intelligent Reading of the NIE
My latest for TCS Daily, “An Intelligent Reading of the National Intelligence Estimate,” is up.
It takes a look at the Key Findings from the controversial National Intelligence Estimate released earlier this week and finds a very mixed bag.
Do you have a leaked copy of the NIE or are you basing your “intelligent reading” on Bush’s selected excerpts?
Bush didn’t release “selected excerpts,” in the sense of carefully chosen bits and pieces, but rather the “Key Findings” section. That, as both my one-sentence description and your quoting of it make clear, is what the article addresses.
The NIE is good as far as I can see – but what it doesn’t do is characterize the level of threats. I’m persuaded by James Fallows’ Atlantic Monthlyarticle from September. The danger from terrorism is more that an attack can provoke us into a self-destructive response. It is like the Spanish flu: it wasn’t the flu that killed, it was the immune response. At this point the terrorists are not even close to mounting a vital threat, much less a survival threat such as we saw during the cold war.