Update: 11/21/2005 - So far I am the only person I have seen blogging on this issue. I have checked Michelle Malkin, Betsy's Page, Powerline, Wizbang, Red State, and Independent Sources , generally one of these guys would have it but nooo........
The LA Times has a compelling article on the development of much of the intelligence used to justify the Iraq war. The underlying theme is that the White House intentionally used false intelligence for their justification, however a careful reading doesn't show that at all. What is shown is a CIA that has adopted an inflexible worldview and is no longer capable of performing its mission. It also shows how the German's by refusing to allow access to the source "Curveball" even to the point of lying about whether or not he spoke English helped lead us into this war.
I have two problems with this article, it attempts to lay blame for the use of this intelligence at the feet of the Bush administration even though the source was developed in 1999 and his reports used to upgrade the reports of Iraqi Biological Weapons productiuon in 2000, under the previous administration. That administration's CIA director remained in place at the CIA until late in the first Bush term, a huge mistake. Second the article doen't mention anywhere in 13 pages that the Robb-Silverman Commision had already examined this and determined that the reliance on "Curveball" was a huge mistake.
From Part 1 of the commission report:
One of the most painful errors, however, concerned Iraq's biological weapons programs. Virtually all of the Intelligence Community's information on Iraq's alleged mobile biological weapons facilities was supplied by a source, codenamed "Curveball," who was a fabricator. We discuss at length how Curveball came to play so prominent a role in the Intelligence Community's biological weapons assessments. It is, at bottom, a story of Defense Department collectors who abdicated their responsibility to vet a critical source; of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) analysts who placed undue emphasis on the source's reporting because the tales he told were consistent with what they already believed; and, ultimately, of Intelligence Community leaders who failed to tell policymakers about Curveball's flaws in the weeks before war.
Curveball was not the only bad source the Intelligence Community used. Even more indefensibly, information from a source who was already known to be a fabricator found its way into finished pre-war intelligence products, including the October 2002 NIE. This intelligence was also allowed into Secretary of State Colin Powell's speech to the United Nations Security Council, despite the source having been officially discredited almost a year earlier. This communications breakdown could have been avoided if the Intelligence Community had a uniform requirement to reissue or recall reporting from a source whose information turns out to be fabricated, so that analysts do not continue to rely on an unreliable report. In the absence of such a system, however, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), which disseminated the report in the first place, had a responsibility to make sure that its bad source did not continue to pollute policy judgments; DIA did not fulfill this obligation.
Our study also revealed deficiencies in particular intelligence products that are used to convey intelligence information to senior policymakers. As noted above, during the course of its investigation the Commission reviewed a number of articles from the President's Daily Brief (PDB) relating to Iraq's WMD programs. Not surprisingly, many of the flaws in other intelligence products can also be found in the PDBs. But we found some flaws that were inherent in the format of the PDBs--a series of short "articles" often based on current intelligence reporting that are presented to the President each morning. Their brevity leaves little room for doubts or nuance--and their "headlines" designed to grab the reader's attention leave no room at all. Also, a daily drumbeat of reports on the same topic gives an impression of confirming evidence, even when the reports all come from the same source.
The Commission also learned that, on the eve of war, the Intelligence Community failed to convey important information to policymakers. After the October 2002 NIE was published, but before Secretary of State Powell made his address about Iraq's WMD programs to the United Nations, serious doubts became known within the Intelligence Community about Curveball, the aforementioned human intelligence source whose reporting was so critical to the Intelligence Community's pre-war biological warfare assessments. These doubts never found their way to Secretary Powell, who was at that time attempting to strip questionable information from his speech.
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