Truespeak

With the recent death watch that has consumed the country, it's pretty obvious that the report presented by The Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction last Thursday is going to get precious little coverage. In fact, just to put things into perspective, I did a Google search today on a few items and obtained the following results:

Search Term - "The Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction"/Web Results - 4,970

Search Term - Pope+death/Web Results - 9,800,000

Search Term - "Terri Schiavo"/Web Results - 12,000,000

That seems about right. After all, the deaths of over 1500 soldiers for what appears to be a great big "I think so," isn't nearly as important as the feud over Terri Schiavo. And I realize that the Pope has passed away, but once again, one person versus the death of over 1500. Not trying to be callous, but Schiavo was ill and dying. The Pope was ill and dying. These 1500 plus soldiers were killed because George Bush sent them to fight a war that was sold on what can only be described as false information.

So, since the media isn't going to do it, Truespeak will. Let's take a closer look at the report, shall we? In fact, the part that most interests me is the first chapter concerning Iraq. Tonight we'll look at the section concerning nuclear (or is that "nukular") weapons.

For starters, the commission sums up its findings as follows:

The Intelligence Community seriously misjudged the status of Iraq's alleged nuclear weapons program in the 2002 NIE and other pre-Iraq war intelligence products. This misjudgment stemmed chiefly from the Community's failure to analyze correctly Iraq's reasons for attempting to procure high-strength aluminum tubes.

As it turns out, there was always disagreement on the uses of these tubes. But more on that later.

To begin with, the report discusses what was known about Iraq's nuclear program following the 1991 Gulf War. And from the looks of things, we appear to have been guessing based upon past behavior and not hard evidence. While past behavior is often a strong indicator of future behavior, these guesses quickly became accepted as fact and any new evidence that didn't align with these guesses was quickly dismissed as unreliable.

After a discussion of what the Iraq Survey Group (ISG) found after the war (no WMD), the report analyzes how the pre-war intelligence got things so wrong. The begin with this statement:

The Intelligence Community's judgment about Iraq's nuclear program hinged chiefly on an assessment about Iraq's intended use for high-strength aluminum tubes it was seeking to procure. Most of the agencies in the Intelligence Community erroneously concluded these tubes were intended for use in centrifuges in a nuclear program rather than in conventional rockets. This error was, at the bottom, the result of poor analytical tradecraft--namely, the failure to do proper technical analysis informed by thorough knowledge of the relevant weapons technology and practices.

As stated before, if the evidence didn't align with the preconceived notion, it was dismissed. To quote the report:

The judgment of most agencies that Baghdad's pursuit of aluminum tubes "provide[d] compelling evidence" that Iraq was reconstituting its weapons turned upon two separate but related analytical determinations. ¹²⁴ The first was that the tubes would not have been well-suited for use in Iraq's conventional military arsenal--in particular, as a conventional rocket casing. The second was that the tubes were a suitable fit for centrifuges in a nuclear program.

This section addresses the soundness of each of these conclusions in turn. We find that the Intelligence Community--and in particular, conventional weapons analysts at the National Ground Intelligence Center (NGIC) in the Defense Department--got the first of these two questions completely wrong; the intercepted tubes were not only well-suited, but were in fact a precise fit, for Iraq's conventional rockets, and the Intelligence Community should have recognized as much at the time. The second question--whether the tubes would have been well-suited for centrifuge applications--was a closer one, but we conclude that certain agencies were more wedded to the analytical position that the tubes were destined for a nuclear program than was justified by the technical evidence. We also conclude that these misjudgments, while reflecting lapses in basic tradecraft, ultimately stemmed from a deeper source: analysts' willingness to accept that a superficially enticing piece of evidence confirmed the prevailing assumption--that Iraq was attempting to reconstitute its nuclear program--was wrong. That CIA and DIA reached this conclusion was a product of, in our view, an effort to fit the evidence to the prevailing assumptions.

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CIA and DIA's confidence in their conclusions also led them to fail to pursue additional, easily obtainable data on the tubes that would have pointed them in the direction of conventional weapons applications. For example, though elements of the Intelligence Community were aware that the Nasser 81 millimeter rocket was likely reverse-engineered from the Italian Medusa air-to-ground rocket, neither DIA nor CIA--the two most vociferous proponents of a nuclear end-use--obtained the specifications for the Medusa rocket until well after the commencement of Operation Iraqi Freedom. ¹³⁷ Indeed, CIA appears to have consciously bypassed attempts to gather this crucial data. A CIA officer had actually suggested that CIA track down the precise dimensions and specifications of the Medusa rocket in order to evaluate the possibility that the tubes Iraq was seeking were in fact intended for rockets. CIA rejected the request in early September 2002, however, on the basis that such information was not needed because CIA judged the tubes to be destined for use in centrifuges--a textbook example of an agency prematurely closing off an avenue of investigation because of its confidence in its conclusions. ¹³⁸

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DIA and CIA analysts overestimated the likelihood that the tubes were intended for use in centrifuges, an erroneous judgment that resulted largely from the unwillingness of many analysts to question--or rigorously test--the underlying assumption that Iraq would try to reconstitute its nuclear program.

Nothing like ignoring the facts. If this were a junior high science project, they'd get an "F" on their research techniques and the validity of their conclusions would be called into question. Good thing this isn't junior high.

The report goes on to find the following:

In addition to citing the aluminum tubes, the NIE's judgment that Iraq was attempting to reconstitute its nuclear weapons program also referred to additional streams of intelligence. These other streams, however, were very thin, and the limited value of that supporting intelligence was inadequately conveyed in the October 2002 NIE and in other Intelligence Community products.

And...

The other indications of reconstitution--aside from the aluminum tubes--did not themselves amount to a persuasive case for a reconstituted Iraqi nuclear program. In light of the tenuousness of this other information, DOE's argument that the aluminum tubes were not for centrifuges but that Iraq was, based on these other streams of information, reconstituting its nuclear program was a flawed analytical position.

Call me crazy, but basing everything on an assumption that your contemporaries can't agree upon doesn't really sound like solid intelligence let alona a "slam dunk." And what of the other evidence that was being used to substantiate their claims?

The gossamer nature of the evidence relied upon by DOE, and the doubts expressed about the attempts to procure uranium from Africa long before the reporting was recalled (more in a moment about this) had led senior officials in other agencies to question the substantive coherence of DOE's position. The former NIO for Strategic and Nuclear Programs, for one, said that he had not fully understood the logic supporting DOE's conclusion that Iraq was reconstituting despite specifically questioning DOE on this point during the NIE coordination meeting. ¹⁸⁶ Similarly, a former senior intelligence officer remarked in November 2004 that DOE's position had "made sense politically but not substantively." ¹⁸⁷ In fact, the DOE intelligence analyst who participated in the coordination meetings for the NIE--while maintaining that there was no political pressure on DOE, direct or indirect, to agree with the reconstitution conclusion at the NIE coordination meeting--conceded to this Commission that "DOE didn't want to come out before the war and say [Iraq] wasn't reconstituting." ¹⁸⁸

Of course we all remember the famous words from Georgieboy's 2003 SOTU Address - "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." Turns out this was based on blatantly forged documents that were provided by a liaison intelligence service in late 2001 and early 2002. According to the commission:

The Intelligence Community failed to authenticate in a timely fashion transparently forged documents purporting to show that Iraq had attempted to procure uranium from Niger.

Once again, this information fit their preconceived notion, so why question it? Concerning those documents, the report states:

The IAEA, after receiving copies of the documents from the United States, reviewed them and immediately concluded that they were forgeries. ²¹¹ As the IAEA found, the documents contained numerous indications of forgery--flaws in the letterhead, forged signatures, misspelled words, incorrect titles for individuals and government entities, and anomalies in the documents' stamps. ²¹² The documents also contained serious errors in content. For example, the document describing the agreement made reference to the legal authority for the agreement, but referenced an out-of-date statutory provision. The document also referred to a meeting that took place on "Wednesday, July 7, 2000" even though July 7, 2000 was a Friday. ²¹³

When I was younger, there was this woman that I worked with who was always on my case. She was always accusing me of something I hadn't done and when I'd deny it she'd say, "Denial is always the first sign of a guilty man." Little did I know that this approach would become the method of operation for our nation's intelligence agencies.

It's truly shameful to think that the lives of over 1500 soldiers didn't warrant a closer look at the evidence. Like a bull in a china shop, we just charged straight ahead without bothering to consider the damage we were doing.

More on the commission's findings concerning Iraq's biological weapons tomorrow.