The Real Bush Intelligence Failure
All these years later, it’s still effed up, writes Schoenfeld at WSJ. In fact, getting effed-upper. I like this part:
The ranking official in charge of analysis at the ODNI is Thomas Fingar, a principal drafter of the misleading Iran NIE and a former State Department official with a long record of undercutting the policies of the Bush White House. It is not an accident that back in September, shortly before the NIE was issued, Mr. Fingar selected as his deputy for “analytic integrity” Richard Immerman, a professor from Temple University who had taken part in “teach-ins” against the war in Iraq, and who had accused the Bush administration of gross malfeasance in the run-up to the invasion. The “Bushites,” Mr. Immerman wrote of the White House in an essay published in January, made “every effort to ‘cook the books,’ they ‘hyped’ the need to go to war, and they lied too often to count.”
In addition to being in charge of maintaining analytic standards, Mr. Immerman also occupies the position of “ombudsman” within the ODNI. In other words, the very official responsible for investigating allegations of partisanship in the production of intelligence is himself a declared partisan in the intelligence wars. No wonder analysts are keeping their heads close to their desks.
What is Mr. McConnell doing about this mess? His attention appears to be focused elsewhere. Late last year, under his guidance the ODNI unfolded a 500-day master plan to set things right. Along with a good number of unexceptionable steps, its number one “core initiative” is to “treat diversity as a strategic mission imperative” — in other words, as the document explains, “We need to have an IC workforce that looks like America.” Toward that end, the plan calls for the design of “mechanisms to hold IC leaders accountable for excellence in EEO [Equal Employment Opportunity] and diversity management.”
You’ve got to ask yourself, what’s the point of having a right-wing dictatorship subverting the Constitution and skewing the intelligence to your evil ends, if you can’t even get your intelligence apparatus to focus on intelligence?
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 7:09 am on Wednesday, April 2, 2008
One Response to “The Real Bush Intelligence Failure”
Leave a Reply
Trackback URLYou must be logged in to post a comment.
April 2nd, 2008 at 8:21 pm
Cripes! The whole article talks about what we don’t know. Rumsfeld, anyone?