Photo: A September 2002 antiwar demonstration in London.
By William M. Connolley, (CC BY-SA 3.0) Licence. Via Wikimedia Commons.
Despite the conviction of her team that the Iraq- and Afghanistan-based entities were in fact independent organizations whose relations were hardly cordial, Vice-President Cheney assumed the contrary. Painstaking work by the CIA proved that a note that reportedly belonged to Iraq's intelligence records and that mentioned Mohammed Atta was forged (based on the dating of the paper and ink, and comparison with travel, bank, etc. records), but the contrary proof was ignored.
Given these priorities, a higher superior told Mrs. Bakos to stay at work instead of taking four days of weapons training to prepare for going to Iraq:
"I would rather have you come back in a body bag than spend that much time out of the office."Mrs. Bakos concludes that the lesson in this episode is that politicians should refer to CIA analysis to guide their policy, not try to make the CIA refer to policy to guide their analysis. That seems to be the tip of the iceberg of conclusions to be drawn.
"I Tried to Make the Intelligence Behind the Iraq War Less Bogus" [Wired], by Nada Bakos (March 18, 2013) [Read March 20, 2013]
Nada Bakos on Twitter — @nadabakos
***
(At the time, I was a seventeen-year-old high school student in Canada who protested against the war. Obviously, I wasn't the only one; and when my mother and I travelled to Italy that November, rainbow-striped peace flags still hung from apartment blocks on the fringes of Milan.)
No comments:
Post a Comment