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"...even the wicked get worse than they deserve." - Willa Cather, One of Ours

Friday, July 09, 2004

The CIA is bad at its job

Associated Press
The key U.S. assertions leading to the 2003 invasion of Iraq - that Saddam Hussein had chemical and biological weapons and was working to make nuclear weapons - were wrong and based on false or overstated CIA analyses, a scathing Senate Intelligence Committee report asserted Friday.

Intelligence analysts fell victim to "group think" assumptions that Iraq had weapons that it did not, concluded a bipartisan report. Many factors contributing to those failures are ongoing problems within the U.S. intelligence community - which cannot be fixed with more money alone, it said.

Sen. Pat Roberts, a Kansas Republican who heads the committee, told reporters that assessments that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons and could make a nuclear weapon by the end of the decade were wrong.

"As the report will show, they were also unreasonable and largely unsupported by the available intelligence," he said.

"This was a global intelligence failure."...
If this is a surprise to you then you haven't been paying attention.

This is not just a US problem, but a problem with the global intelligence community. The UN, UK, Germany, France, Russia and Israeli intelligence services all agreed with this assessment. In fact the Germans stated as an unequivocal fact that the Iraqis already had a nuclear weapon.

But this is not a valid excuse. The CIA must be better than these other intelligence services. The American people deserve better.

Tenant has proven himself unwilling to reform the CIA. The lack of any significant human intelligence program (i.e. CIA agents undercover in enemy territory), is best illustrated by the fact that in September 2001 the CIA had no agents inside the borders of Afghanistan or Iraqi controlled territory.

The CIA policy of not putting agents into any situation that presents the possibility of personal danger to CIA employees is totally absurd. Most agents fail and are killed. It is a cruel fact of life.

The unwillingness of the CIA to take risks has placed the lives of the US civilian population in danger.
Posted by: Zayphar / 7/09/2004 09:19:00 AM
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