Stovepiping

Ragusa · Oct 21, 2003

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Great article by Seymour Hersh named "Stovepiping", about the intelligence assessment of the current US administration that effectively led into the Iraq war.

Summed up it sais that the neocon ideologues didn't trust in the "intelligence establishment" which as they felt was spoiled by the Clinton years and for their taste too careful in their assessments and decided to see all raw intelligence themselves, a process named "stovepiping", and to analyse themselves unhampered by professional caution or concerns.

So the neocons fed themselves with what they wanted to see - and that is basically the sum of their fears - and fed the president with it, who, unsurprisingly, succumbed to this onslaught of genuinely concerned and experienced people, and who then started to see Saddam as a genuine threat and danger, losing aim on the war on terror redirecting resources for Iraq - where they are bound now.

Highly recommended, and much more detailed than my summary.

My fav quotes from the article:

... the intelligence reports about Iraq provided by the United Nations inspection teams and the International Atomic Energy Agency, which monitored Iraq’s nuclear-weapons programs, were far more accurate than the C.I.A. estimates. “Some of the old-timers in the community are appalled by how bad the analysis was,” the official said. “If you look at them side by side, C.I.A. versus United Nations, the U.N. agencies come out ahead across the board.”
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... Bolton acknowledged that he had changed the procedures for handling intelligence, in an effort to extend the scope of the classified materials available to his office. “I found that there was lots of stuff that I wasn’t getting and that the INR analysts weren’t including,” he told me. “I didn’t want it filtered. I wanted to see everything—to be fully informed ...
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The defectors, however, had an audience prepared to believe the worst. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had long complained about the limits of American intelligence. In the late nineteen-nineties, for example, he had chaired a commission on ballistic-missile programs that criticized the unwillingness of intelligence analysts “to make estimates that extended beyond the hard evidence they had in hand.”
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In fact, the best case for the success of the U.N. inspection process in Iraq was in the area of nuclear arms.
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By early March, 2002, a former White House official told me, it was understood by many in the White House that the President had decided, in his own mind, to go to war.
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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. When INR analysts did get a look at the reports, they were troubled by what they found.
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The Vice-President also defended the way in which he had involved himself in intelligence matters: “This is a very important area. It’s one that the President has asked me to work on. . . . In terms of asking questions, I plead guilty. I ask a hell of a lot of questions. That’s my job.”
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A blind man at the wheel, told by his advisors, who are blinding themselves while celebrating their smartness to do so, where to drive - united on their road to folly - a receipe for diasaster. And there we are.

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Stovepiping

Ragusa Eternal Halfling Paladin Veteran