It's Not Rocket Science
...It's Academic!
Michael Tanji on the latest Senate "Intelligence" Report [Emphasis Added]:
Disturbingly, the report treats actual and potential source material in a curious, if not outright suspect, manner. Substantial weight is given the statements from top former regime officials with every incentive to lie--including Saddam Hussein himself--while at the same time the report disregards the treasure-trove of documents, audio and video tapes, and computer disks that have not been fully analyzed. ...
Understanding what was going on in Iraq prior to the allied invasion, what we got right in our pre-war intelligence assessments, and where we went horribly wrong, will require and effort that is years away from what any congressional committee is prepared to carry out. Which means that the new Senate Intelligence report is nothing more than an academic exercise designed not to illuminate an important area of inquiry, but to make political hay.
TO BEGIN WITH, understand that we are somewhere in the first quarter of the timeline along which a thorough post-mortem should be carried out. Even under the best of circumstances, it would be impossible to wrap up the history of Saddam's Iraq in four years given that mountains of data have yet to be fully examined--and that vast majority of suspected sites in Iraq that have yet to be explored.
I was involved in the process of exploiting captured document and other media for roughly four years. When the SSCI report says captured media has been given an "initial review" the closest analogy is that it is giving a Cliffs Notes version of the story. If you were honest, you would never say that you have read and understand the intricacies of Shakespeare because you skimmed the Cliffs Notes version. Yet that is what military intelligence, and in turn the SSCI, are saying when they insist that they have not missed anything of significance from media captured in Iraq. ...
Tanji is on point, as usual. As I am going to argue in an upcoming piece though, it's actually worse than that. The report misreports the contents of the two documents it purports to analyze and simply ignores dozens of reports that contradict the authors' preconceived conclusions.
Michael Tanji on the latest Senate "Intelligence" Report [Emphasis Added]:
Disturbingly, the report treats actual and potential source material in a curious, if not outright suspect, manner. Substantial weight is given the statements from top former regime officials with every incentive to lie--including Saddam Hussein himself--while at the same time the report disregards the treasure-trove of documents, audio and video tapes, and computer disks that have not been fully analyzed. ...
Understanding what was going on in Iraq prior to the allied invasion, what we got right in our pre-war intelligence assessments, and where we went horribly wrong, will require and effort that is years away from what any congressional committee is prepared to carry out. Which means that the new Senate Intelligence report is nothing more than an academic exercise designed not to illuminate an important area of inquiry, but to make political hay.
TO BEGIN WITH, understand that we are somewhere in the first quarter of the timeline along which a thorough post-mortem should be carried out. Even under the best of circumstances, it would be impossible to wrap up the history of Saddam's Iraq in four years given that mountains of data have yet to be fully examined--and that vast majority of suspected sites in Iraq that have yet to be explored.
I was involved in the process of exploiting captured document and other media for roughly four years. When the SSCI report says captured media has been given an "initial review" the closest analogy is that it is giving a Cliffs Notes version of the story. If you were honest, you would never say that you have read and understand the intricacies of Shakespeare because you skimmed the Cliffs Notes version. Yet that is what military intelligence, and in turn the SSCI, are saying when they insist that they have not missed anything of significance from media captured in Iraq. ...
Tanji is on point, as usual. As I am going to argue in an upcoming piece though, it's actually worse than that. The report misreports the contents of the two documents it purports to analyze and simply ignores dozens of reports that contradict the authors' preconceived conclusions.
posted by Thomas Joscelyn at 1:14 PM
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