:: NEWS COCKTAIL aka BlahBlahBlog ::
"Everything is being compressed into tiny tablets. You take a little pill of news every day - 23 minutes - and that's supposed to be enough." -Walter Cronkite, RE TV news. The Web has changed that for many, however, and here is an extra dose for your daily news cocktail. This prescription tends to include surveillance and now war-related links, along with the occasional pop culture junk and whatever else seizes my attention as I scan online news sites.:: 4.01.2005 ::
:: "What the report didn't say..." ::
An Op/Ed from USATODAY.com
Sometimes the most intriguing news is found in what's left unsaid. That was certainly true Thursday, as a presidential commission issued a blistering, if unsurprising, indictment of U.S. intelligence-gathering in the months leading up to war in Iraq.
The commission found, as others had, that the nation's spy agencies were "dead wrong" about Iraq having weapons of mass destruction. It cited a panoply of failures - from a lack of spies in the right places to the agencies' tendency to squash dissenting views. The report describes how the agencies, unwilling to admit that they lacked hard facts, instead relied on worthless information, bad assumptions and a key source who was lying.
Many of the same weaknesses persist today. The agencies "know disturbingly little about the nuclear programs of many of the world's most dangerous actors," the commission found.
On a practical level, those findings may help deter any backsliding on changes already underway to unify the nation's splintered intelligence system. Those reforms were driven by an equally scathing report issued by the 9/11 Commission last August.
More interesting, though, is what's missing from this new report. The report didn't attempt to connect the intelligence failures to the fateful decision they encouraged: to go to war on what proved to be false grounds.
If the report is taken at face value, this was all the fault of the spy agencies' blundering. The bipartisan commission found no evidence that intelligence judgments were changed because of political pressure. The commission chairs, senior federal Judge Laurence Silberman and former Virginia senator Charles Robb, reiterated that finding on Thursday.
But in a few telling paragraphs among more than 600 pages, the panel allowed that some analysts were influenced by the conventional wisdom, which said Saddam Hussein was hiding an arsenal, and "the sense that challenges to it - or even refusals to find its confirmation - would not be welcome."
Little wonder. In the months before the war, Vice President Cheney said there was "no doubt" Saddam was amassing weapons. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said that even "a trained ape" knew it was true. President Bush repeatedly made the case not just that war in Iraq was necessary, but that it was urgent.
That is not a climate that would lead anyone to conclude that facts still needed to be discerned. And it is one that needs change, beginning at the intelligence agencies.
Even 9/11 and the deaths of more 1,500 U.S. troops in Iraq haven't budged them from bad habits, particularly refusals to share information and encourage differing views, the commission said. The nation's new intelligence czar will need to knock heads.
For the political leadership, the task is simpler. They need only leave room for facts to get in the way of their conclusions - and use war only as a last resort.
posted by me
:: 9:42:00 AM [+] ::
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