PREWAR INTELLIGENCE….Was prewar Iraq an intelligence failure? Or did the White House spin the intelligence data until it was unrecognizable?
Carl Ford, the newly retired head of the State Department’s intelligence arm, says it was an intelligence failure:
Contrary to charges by some critics that the Bush administration politicized the intelligence, Ford argued that the intelligence community ? a collection of agencies including the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the National Imagery and Mapping Agency and Ford’s bureau at the State Department ? cannot blame its failure on pressure from the administration.
For now, I’m sticking with my sense that the answer is “both,” but I imagine we’re going to be hearing a lot more opinions about this over the next few months. This battle is just heating up.
