| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"Fred Stone" |
| Date: |
14 Sep 2006 12:12:54 PM |
| Object: |
Taking Intelligence Seriously |
http://makeashorterlink.com/?I27D263CD
IT TOOK ONLY A FEW MINUTES for media outlets to disseminate headlines
about how the recent Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report
comparing pre-war intelligence claims against post-war findings was a
refutation of the stated reasons for overthrowing Saddam Hussein.
Focusing on the conclusions of the multi-section report, most news
accounts walked down a checklist of the "lies" allegedly perpetrated by
the Bush administration.
But the SSCI report is of limited use for anyone seriously attempting to
understand what was--and was not--going on in pre-war Iraq. The report
is limited in scope, comparing primarily the 2002 National Intelligence
Estimate on Iraq with the findings of the Iraqi Survey Group and a small
set of supplemental materials.
Disturbingly, the report treats actual and potential source material in
a curious, if not outright suspect, manner. Substantial weight is given
the statements from top former regime officials with every incentive to
lie--including Saddam Hussein himself--while at the same time the report
disregards the treasure-trove of documents, audio and video tapes, and
computer disks that have not been fully analyzed. As I have said before
about the shortcomings of our approach to captured media exploitation:
We could very well have in our possession ample material to support
all the reasons the public was told justified going to war--or we could
find the opposite, or find there are no clear conclusions to be drawn.
But unless we look, we will always be faced--in the immortal words of
Donald Rumsfeld--with a huge cache of "unknown unknowns."
After all the detainees have been interrogated, and all of the sand
at suspected facilities has been sifted and tested, the only way finally
to close the book on what [was going on in the former regime] is to
analyze every last reliable source of data available to us. That is, if
we are really interested in the truth.
Understanding what was going on in Iraq prior to the allied invasion,
what we got right in our pre-war intelligence assessments, and where we
went horribly wrong, will require [an] effort that is years away from
what any congressional committee is prepared to carry out. Which means
that the new Senate Intelligence report is nothing more than an academic
exercise designed not to illuminate an important area of inquiry, but to
make political hay.
TO BEGIN WITH, understand that we are somewhere in the first quarter of
the timeline along which a thorough post-mortem should be carried out.
Even under the best of circumstances, it would be impossible to wrap up
the history of Saddam's Iraq in four years given that mountains of data
have yet to be fully examined--and that vast majority of suspected sites
in Iraq that have yet to be explored.
I was involved in the process of exploiting captured document and other
media for roughly four years. When the SSCI report says captured media
has been given an "initial review" the closest analogy is that it is
giving a Cliffs Notes version of the story. If you were honest, you
would never say that you have read and understand the intricacies of
Shakespeare because you skimmed the Cliffs Notes version. Yet that is
what military intelligence, and in turn the SSCI, are saying when they
insist that they have not missed anything of significance from media
captured in Iraq.
Updating our knowledge of pre-war Iraq should be a near-real-time
effort. New discoveries that alter preconceptions about Saddam and Iraq
are being found all the time; in part from data not considered by the
SSCI report and in part from the soldiers on the ground that unearth new
information on a daily basis. Given all of this, we should not be
capturing the post-war examination of Iraq in printed tomes released
years after the fact. Rather, all of the open source and declassified
materials should be crafted into a Wiki and posted online for interested
parties to examine, analyze, debate, and comment on.
IF NOTHING ELSE the SSCI report highlights how inadequate our
intelligence coverage of Iraq was before the war and how woeful our
efforts to rectify those shortcomings have been since.
Prior to the war, Iraq fell into the intelligence bin labeled "hard
target," which is a euphemism for countries where we are essentially
unable to recruit agents and that have the ability to hide from our
satellites. The SSCI report notes that the CIA apparently had only one
highly-placed source in Iraq's government. Our dominance in technical
collection capabilities was also no great help. As a Pentagon briefing
pointed out in 2002, Iraq had a highly capable denial and deception
program that made technical intelligence virtually useless.
These shortcomings in Iraq should be object lessons for current
intelligence reform. Our approach to hard targets in the past was
clearly inadequate. It is time for original thinking--or perhaps the
adoption of some more risky practices--to avoid future intelligence
gaps.
IN COMPUTER SCIENCE the phrase "garbage in, garbage out" is a reference
to the fact that if you enter bad data into a computer program, it will
dutifully return bad results. The initial response upon seeing an
unexpected answer is to mutter "stupid computer," until you go back and
realize you fed the machine rubbish (computers cannot yet mutter back to
the stupid human). In a sense the process followed by the SSCI staff is
similar to a focused and well-meaning computer; they had specific
directions and specific sets of data to process.
As long as our efforts to address outstanding issues related to the war
are reduced to hand-waving arguments intentionally based on incomplete
sets of data, a comprehensive and accurate truth about pre-war Iraq will
never be known.
Michael Tanji is a former senior U.S. intelligence officer and an
associate of the Terrorism Research Center. He opines at
blog.groupintel.com.
--
Fred Stone
aa# 1369
"When liberals’ presidential nominees consistently fail to carry Kansas,
liberals do not rush to read a book titled “What’s the Matter With
Liberals’ Nominees?'’ No, the book they turned into a best-seller is
titled “What’s the Matter With Kansas?'’ Notice a pattern here?"
--
Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com
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| User: "Eudaemonic Plague" |
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| Title: Re: Taking Intelligence Seriously |
14 Sep 2006 03:46:18 PM |
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"Fred Stone" <fstone69@earthling.com> wrote in message
news:Xns983E900ABE407fstone69@66.150.105.47...
What the ***** is wrong with you, boy? You've been posting your
***** political crap here for far too long. Why don't you grow the
***** up, and take your idiocy to someplace where it would be on-topic?
It's bad enough that you're doing this ***** in the first place, but
you're ALWAYS wrong wrong wrongity wrong! You're an EMBARRASSMENT to
the rest of us! You remind me of that loon that's been posting porn
crap on rasfw....
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| User: "Fred Stone" |
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| Title: Re: Taking Intelligence Seriously |
14 Sep 2006 03:13:16 PM |
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It's too bad that you're embarrassed by the many lies you've
been hearing from the Democrats for the last six years, but that's not
my fault. I'm hardly the only one posting political "crap" here. I've
said many times that I'll be happy to stop when the others do.
--
Fred Stone
aa# 1369
"When liberals’ presidential nominees consistently fail to carry Kansas,
liberals do not rush to read a book titled “What’s the Matter With
Liberals’ Nominees?'’ No, the book they turned into a best-seller is
titled “What’s the Matter With Kansas?'’ Notice a pattern here?"
--
Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com
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| User: "Eudaemonic Plague" |
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| Title: Re: Taking Intelligence Seriously |
15 Sep 2006 07:15:58 PM |
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Fred Stone wrote:
It's too bad that you're embarrassed by the many lies you've
been hearing from the Democrats for the last six years, but that's not
my fault. I'm hardly the only one posting political "crap" here. I've
said many times that I'll be happy to stop when the others do.
It's really a shame that you haven't a brain. What the ***** makes you
think I listen to Democrats any more than I do your gang? Unlike you, I
think, and I don't let someone else choose for me....also unlike you.
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| User: "Fred Stone" |
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| Title: Re: Taking Intelligence Seriously |
16 Sep 2006 05:33:49 AM |
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Eudaemonic Plague <ghod@ameritech.net> wrote in
news:2nHOg.1320$TV3.192@newssvr21.news.prodigy.com:
Fred Stone wrote:
It's too bad that you're embarrassed by the many lies you've
been hearing from the Democrats for the last six years, but that's
not my fault. I'm hardly the only one posting political "crap" here.
I've said many times that I'll be happy to stop when the others do.
It's really a shame that you haven't a brain. What the ***** makes you
think I listen to Democrats any more than I do your gang? Unlike you,
I think, and I don't let someone else choose for me....also unlike
you.
Your little diatribe would be more credible if you weren't just
repeating the lame propaganda that the Democrats have been putting out.
Claiming at the same time that you "think" and that you "don't let
someone else choose for you" is really a sad joke.
--
Fred Stone
aa# 1369
"When liberals’ presidential nominees consistently fail to carry Kansas,
liberals do not rush to read a book titled “What’s the Matter With
Liberals’ Nominees?'’ No, the book they turned into a best-seller is
titled “What’s the Matter With Kansas?'’ Notice a pattern here?"
--
Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com
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