http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=2867479&page=1The Pentagon Report on Intelligence: Aiming at the Wrong Target
Objective Analysis Has Been the Exception, Not the Rule for Decades
OPINION By ANTHONY CORDESMAN
As a former director of intelligence assessment for the secretary of defense, I find the debate over the reporting done before the invasion of Iraq by the Office of the Under Secretary for Policy to be aimed at the wrong target and a bit absurd.
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For decades, I have seen officials in the office of the secretary of defense and other departments, and officials and officers in the military services, manipulate intelligence and studies to serve their own interests, and tailor briefings to the same end. In fact, the neoconservatives have probably abused the system far less in going to war in Iraq than the neoliberals did in Vietnam.
Such efforts have long become part of the "information is power" game in Washington, and using secrets is an essential part of winning it. More than two decades ago, for example, I had to fight the USAF tooth and nail to stop them from pushing DIA into creating a threat aircraft simply to justify their latest fighter procurement. I saw another element of the office of the secretary of defense try to manipulate intelligence on Soviet artillery to justify reliance on tactical nuclear weapons, and I watched the Army fake T-72 intelligence to justify the M-1.
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No one in his right mind has reason to trust the briefings, studies and analyses produced by the government or its ever-growing community of contractors and consultants — many of which have tenuous qualifications at best. Analysis, whether called intelligence or not, is simply part of the Washington dialectic. The only way to deal with one set of biases is to examine the others. Read enough studies and you may be able to guess at the truth; trust any one study or supplier of studies and you deserve to be fooled.
Sen. Levin and the inspector general of the Department of Defense do have good reason to question the quality and bias in virtually all of the work done in preparing for the Iraq War. However, the idea that any analytic work within a 100-mile radius of the Capitol can normally be trusted to be unbiased and objective (or even competent) is absurd. The idea that intelligence is somehow pure and policy is not, and that intelligence is not simply one more source of information that will be as ruthlessly manipulated as any other, is nonsense.
Anthony Cordesman, is an ABC News Consultant and a Senior Fellow, Center for Strategic and International Studies.
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