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Friday, March 26, 2004
Baghdad State of Mind
On NPR this morning, someone read snippets of the 9/11 Commission's Committee Staff Report on Intelligence and one particular part caught my ear:
Some CIA officials expressed frustration about the pace of policymaking during the stressful summer of 2001. Although Tenet said he thought the policy machinery was working in what he called a rather orderly fashion, Deputy DCI McLaughlin told us he felt a great tension — especially in June and July 2001 — between the new administration’s need to understand these issues and his sense that this was a matter of great urgency. Officials, including McLaughlin, were also frustrated when some policymakers, who had not lived through such threat surges before, questioned the validity of the intelligence or wondered if it was disinformation, though they were persuaded once they probed it. Two veteran CTC officers who were deeply involved in UBL issues were so worried about an impending disaster that one of them told us that they considered resigning and going public with their concerns. DCI Tenet, who was briefing the President and his top advisers daily, told us that his sense was that officials at the White House had grasped the sense of urgency he was communicating to them.
So let me see if I understand this correctly: the Bush Administration questioned "the validity of intelligence" regarding Al Qaeda and "wondered if it was disinformation" but did no such thing when it came to intelligence about Iraq and weapons of mass destruction.
Wow.
I think we need to know who the "policymakers" are that the report references.
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