WMD: is the CIA incompetent?

Great Debates
1

Even if the WMD are found today, the failure to find WMD until now looks like a massive failure of the intelligence services. Consider the available intelligence-gathering assets: satellite surveillance, defectors, prisoners of war, and sophisticated detection devices used by the UN inspectors. Yet to this moment, there is a large gap between the early reports of evidence of WMD, and the recent searches based on that evidence. Either the early reports were wrong, or the intelligence branches lost track of their targets.

Can anybody trust the intelligence services anymore?

I am posing this question without any requirement that GWB lied, and I’d rather not deviate into that debate. My contention, in any case, is that the CIA and gang have failed in their main missions so many times that it would be laughable were it not so disturbing.

Saddam is still at large. So is Osama. 9/11. Kuwait. Sudan. Rwanda. I have to wonder – are they earning their pay?

2

Are there actual citations showing that the CIA genuinely believed the WMD existed?

3

I think that the Iraq invasion was mostly a DoD affair.
By DoD i don’t mean joint Chiefs of Staff, but the Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

4

I’m with tomndebb here. My reading of the news services (and not just the American ones) before, during, and after the war was that the CIA had (a) no conclusive proof of any ties between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda, and (b) no conclusive proof that Iraq had a viable WMD program that was churning out tons of stuff, to kill every man, woman, and child in the United States any time soon – both of which were key points in the Administration’s attempts to sell the war. There were even some “anonymous sources” in the intelligence community grousing about how the White House was leaning on the CIA and FBI to find something to support the Administration’s position points above.

If you want to stick to the requirement that we don’t consider the possibility that GWB and/or his underlings lied, I think this will be a rather short debate.

5

The bad intel analyses apparently came from Rumsfeld’s Office of Special Plans AKA OSP, or “the Cabal.”
The New Yorker just ran an article on the organization:

6

A better question might be “Why is the CIA ignored?”
The CIA and the State Department have “problems” with the INC and Chalabi.

7

I used to only half jokingly kid that the CIA must be killing the right people overseas prior to 9/11 due to the fact that with all the laxness of security in domestic airports and hatred of the US amongst terrorist organizations overseas, hijackings never occurred in the US.

The CIA has moved away from human assets since the 1970’s, and there are limits to what can be accomplished with satellites and communications intercepts. I don’t consider the failure to find Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein to be that surprising. It can be very hard to find a single person who doesn’t want to be found. Pablo Escobar was able to continue to run a drug empire for some time, even when he was on the run from a task force set up to hunt him down with sophisticated electronics. It has been questioned whether or not he was committing suicide when he was finally found, as he was talking from a stationary location on a cell phone, something that he knew not to do.

The failure to find substantial amounts of WMDs presupposes that they exist. Hmm, I was going to say I’m not sure that the CIA ever really claimed that, but I googled this on up, published October 2002:

Iraq’s weapons of Mass Destruction Programs

It does frequently use the word probably, and it came out at a time when the need for war was being sold to the American public, but the CIA did publish it.

I hope none of this comes across as a desire for the CIA to return to the glory days prior to the 1970’s, I’m not too fond of a lot of their work during the cold war.

8

The CIA isn’t searching for the weapons in Iraq, so if they’re incompetent, it’s hard to say this has anything to do with it. And as noted above, they were more skeptical of the possibility of weapons existing or being found than the Pentagon and other groups. If anything, massive discoveries of WMD - not that anyone seems to be expecting such at this point - would make the CIA look incompetent, not the contrary.

9

From the testimony of George Tenet before the Senate Armed Services Committee on 2/12/03:

CHAIRMAN WARNER: Is it your professional judgment that there will be clearly found caches of weapons of mass destruction to establish beyond a reasonable doubt that he had them?

TENET: Sir, I believe that we will. I think that when you listened to Secretary Powell’s statement to the United Nations you noted a specific intercept that told operational units to ensure that the word “nerve agents” never appeared in any communications, so we know that weapons have been subordinated to units. And I believe that we will find R&D, we will find stockpiles of things he has not declared and weapons he has not declared.

10

The CIA was pressured by senior Bush administration officials to make Iraq appear to be a threat.

This was a failure of leadership, not intelligence.

11

Well, it was a failure of intelligence as well… just not in the informational, investigative sense.

12

Yep: a failure of intelligence on the part of the electorate.

Maybe they’ll grade on a curve next time around.

13

Well, remember- Saddam had quite a bit of time after the ultimatum to destroy or send the WMD into Syria. My guess is that both is what happened. But remember- WMD were not the only reason for the war. Of course, I don’t think that even possesing massive WMD is an excuse to invade a sovereign nation, but that point is now moot.

Certainly, SH had quite a bit in the way of WMD in the past. And the UN & Blix asked for evidence that he destroyed it during the in-between time- and SH couldn’t come up with anything. Leading one to one of 2 possible conclusions: 1. he hadn’t yet destroyed them. or 2- even tho the inspections had been stopped, he went ahead & destroyed all that very hard-to-get-rid-of-safely nasty armaments, but kept no records. Which since his regime kept scads of records on everything, would be unusual. Why would he have destroyed the WMD during the time when the Inspections had been halted? Even Blix was very suspicious of this.

And, I hate all the airchaim quarterbacks talking about how something was so “obvious” after the fact.

Like the 9-11 attacks. Sure, there was some evidence something was coming. And, if you assemble all the pieces of the puzzle that the US intelligence agencies had, and now look at it with 20/20 hindsight, sure you can see something. But let us continue this jigsaw puzzle analogy. Let us say your freind has one of those 1000 piece jigsaw puzzles, and he has assembled some half of it. And, then you have the box lid, with most of the picture to look at. Very easy to say- yes, there is some red, that’s going to be the barn- and that horn there, and the hooves, that’s the unicorn- and those fluffy bits, THOSE are sheep, and THESE are clouds…

But let us take the box away. Then, we mix all the pieces back up. Then, just for grins, we add in another 2000 pieces- half from another puzzle, and some from no puzzle at all. Then, we add a few pieces deliberately designed to fit, but show a misleading picture. Now let us see you put it together. That’s about where the CIA & co were before 911. It is so very easy, after you know there is has been an attack, to sort out all & only the intelligence that relates to that incident, and also ignore the false intelligence. But note that word- AFTER. Try doing it before. It is a little bit like those Nostrdamus quartains, that dudes can pull one out AFTER the fact, and say “oohh, see here THIS must mean that, and this line here clearly alludes to this, and this is an allegory for that fact”. But they never manage to do that before the event- do they?

14

DrDeth-“Let us say your freind has one of those 1000 piece jigsaw puzzles, and he has assembled some half of it…[excessive puzzle analogy snipped]…Now let us see you put it together”

First, let us further suppose that I have spent twenty years studying and working on putting puzzles together. Also that I have a multi million dollar puzzle solving budget.

:wink:

15

Piffle. If you are going to press for the invasion of a foreign nation, you by God better have all your ducks in a row! Which is what we were told. Solid evidence, no shadows, no questions, no qualifiers. Saddam had 'em, and he was gonna use 'em, and he was gonna use 'em on us. No ifs, ands, or buts. Its way, way too late for that kind of crapola.