Transterrestrial Musings

Comments

We went with the Humint networks we had -- Chalabi and the exiles -- rather than the Humint we wished
we had. Wait! Isn't that the Rumsfeld Doctrine?

Posted by Bill White at May 9, 2007 12:17 PM

Human intellgience may be "all-important" but it's damn hard to come by in a place like Saddam Hussien's Iraq. No matter how much money you throw at it I suspect it's going to be hard to get a highly placed turncoat in that kind of regime. Electronic surveillance may be less certain in some ways but it's more readily obtainable.

The intelligence business is always something of a guessing game. A lot of folks in this country seem to have lost sight of that (if they ever realized it) because they don't like the (relatively) false positive we received in recent years. But better a flase positive than a false negative, IMO.

Posted by KeithK at May 9, 2007 12:32 PM

A large part of the problem was the government idea to use ELINT over the exorbitant HUMINT. We are paying a price for short-sightedness.

Posted by Mac at May 9, 2007 01:25 PM

No matter how much money you throw at it I suspect it's going to be hard to get a highly placed turncoat in that kind of regime.

And it's worth noting that we were not the only major power with an interest in knowing what was going on in Iraq and the rest of the Middle East -- we were just the one that had virtually no HUMINT program in operation. What did all the other intel agencies say?

Anyone? Bueller?

Posted by McGehee at May 9, 2007 01:55 PM

UK mentioned something about yellow cake uranium, a claim they still stick by. HUMINT on the ground may have helped legitimize the information.

Posted by Mac at May 9, 2007 02:05 PM

Entertaining but non of this matters to the debate about the quality of pre war intel and the justification of why we went to war.

If anything it reflects even worse on the folks who made the decision to go.

I find it so funny to remember those grand days when DeLay and then in the 00 campaign Bush were beating up on the then DCI for sending cruises into Sudan...and latter every fracken word he said was from the mind of god.

What a bunch of losers.

Robert

Posted by Robert G. Oler at May 9, 2007 02:09 PM

I would add one more thing.

Pre going into Iraq we had Humit. We had numereous special ops teams (Tram Trainor retired USMC Book Cobra2) who more or less:

(drum roll)

COULDNT FIND THE WMD.

The Administration found that an "inconvienant reality".

Robert

Posted by Robert G. Oler at May 9, 2007 02:10 PM

Robert spews: Entertaining but non of this matters to the debate about the quality of pre war intel and the justification of why we went to war.

Considering that the posted thread is mentioning human intelligence, one would have to assume that's what the thread was about. Aren't you always calling for reading comprehension?

Posted by Mac at May 9, 2007 02:31 PM

Imagine had Bill Clinton done what this administration has done in IRaq!

The neo's would be storming the gates of the White HOuse...instead they are busilly making one lame excuse after the other.

So much for "personal responsiblity"....LOL

As the song says "What is cooler the cool"

What is lamer then lame,...the neos trying to pass the buck.

Robert

Posted by Robert G. Oler at May 9, 2007 02:31 PM

Storming the gates? Probably, but that's politics. I've never denied that BOTH sides of the aisle try to grab power any time they can. However, a government that may need to admit some mistakes is not "personal responsibility" as much as a president admitting to having "relations" in the Oval Office. The administration in the former is a group of people that made mistakes, so not personal. Personal responsibility applies to one's self, as the previous Pres showed none in his actions with the intern.

Posted by Mac at May 9, 2007 02:49 PM

It doesn't particularly matter how much intelligence you collect if your plan is to throw it all out and invade anyway.

And please, spare us. We all know that half of congress is banging their interns.

Posted by Adrasteia at May 9, 2007 03:04 PM

Personal responsibility applies to one's self, as the previous Pres showed none in his actions with the intern.

Posted by Mac at May 9, 2007 02:49 PM

And wouldnt that be a matter between his "spousal unit" and no one else?

It is inappropriate behavior at work when a collegue is going through a divorce or an extramarital affiar to say "I dont believe (insert name here) about (insert thing here) because (insert name here) is lying to their spouse about having an affair".

That would be an inappropriate linkage and any supervisor would make short work of people who started acting like that to a coworker.

The appropriate response to "He/she is cheating on their spouse we should not believe them about (insert this)" is "that is a private matter between the two of them off job site. If you want to stop associating with them off work, fine, but on work we all work and play well together".

Now Mr. Clinton did "lie" to the American people when he denyed having "sexual relations" or he exaggerated or whatever.

So lets compare things.

"I did not have sex with that woman" or "I know without a doubt with a certianty that there is WMD in Iraq and we are going to invade Iraq and lose many thousand Americans, run our foreign policy into the ground and after all not do the entire affair very competently because everyone who is saying do it another way is wrong and we are not listening to".

Me I am picky. If someone "exaggerates/misstates" their own personal problems that is one thing. Tell me a lie about work or something outside of the personal situation...that is another.

Clinton wasnt the first to bonk with consensual intimacy someone other then his wife.

People who harp on that and yet are "free Scooter libby" and "its OK that Bush et al said what they said even though it was well wrong"

are less with me.

Robert

Posted by Robert G. Oler at May 9, 2007 05:20 PM

They may well be, but it was an example only to illustrate my point.

Posted by Mac at May 9, 2007 05:21 PM

They may well be, but it was an example only to illustrate my point.

Posted by Mac at May 9, 2007 05:21 PM...

what other examples do you have?

The problem with the far right, the "strong foreign policy" people, the beat them until they squel people. Is that in the end they cannot point to a single mistake Bill Clinton made in foreign policy that was not an action that in real time, given pre 9/11 knowledge THAT THEY WOULD HAVE SUPPORTED DOING.

When people say "Clinton should have done X" with Al Queda. My first question is "did you support the cruise missiles into Sudan and Afland?"

I can show you quotes where Tom DeLay etc DIDNT. In fact mocked the effort. Sometimes even mocking the person who was DCI at the time. Oddly enough it was exactly the correct thing to do. Everyone (well almost everyone) would support troops on the ground in AFland post 9/11. But that support was not so firm pre 9/11.

Had Clinton done "something" in retaliation for the USS COle, I have no doubt the squealers on the GOP right would have said "Trying help Gore get elected..."

The collolary is that everyone of the squealers gives Bush a complete pass pre 9/11. If Clinton was so "Bad" pre 9/11. Why didnt Bush come in and IMMEDIATLY start changing things? People, mostly the same people under Clinton were urging more aggressive action.

But I see no evidence that Bush was taking that.

Then there is the near catastrophes of Iraq and Afland, the stretching of the US armed forces, the drawdown of supplies with no real build up..and the right remains more or less silent. The argument is all "Clinton let this happen".

And even if he did, then if one is going to say that, then one has to be at least equally critical of the last four years in Iraq, which were essentially thrown down the drain.

There are three major problems with the GOP right. The first is that they are dumb. They dont recognize that we are in as new a kind of "warfare" environment, that things have shifted just as much as they did on Dec 7, 1941. They are using a "cold war" armed effort against an entirely different force.

The second is that they are dumber. They cant face the realities of the rights own failings...instead they look around over and over again to blame them on someone or something else.

And the third is that they are dumbest around (well the far left is as well). They are hypocrites. All three thigns are across the board. Bush V Gore was the most expansive use of federal power in a long time. But yet the states rights people "cheer" it put their guy in power.

Clinton had his faults. I think that he had the sexual morals of an alley cat. This guy and his administration make those faults seem trivial. They have the morals of people who would send others to their deaths...on exaggerations.

That has got to hurt the far right. They were had by Rove and all who crafted a person who was just what they wanted. Until the election was over.

Then he was just as dumb as them.

Robert

Posted by Robert G. Oler at May 9, 2007 06:49 PM

Soecial forces would be able to gather some limited information about Iraq's WMD program, but I think it would have been rather easy to fool them (as well as spy satellites) by maintaining high activity at WMD sites. And let's recall that Saddam Hussein did apparently attempt to fool the US into thinking that he had more WMD than he really had.

Posted by Karl Hallowell at May 10, 2007 06:27 AM

According to Tram Trainor Special Forces on the ground in the Sudan were the intel that convinced Clinton to toss the cruise missiles into the factory.

Tram has said, and Zinni backs him up (as does Owens) that every US special force operation in Irag pre invasion came up a dry hole. Including "stopping" one of the supposed mobile labs that Colin had drawings of.

It is pretty obvious that we had "some prior" Knowledge that these "labs" were not what Colin was saying that they were. David Bloom before his death did a story on when the folks he was embedded with came up to one of those "labs" wrecked along with some other Iraqi army units. As he noted while examining it the Army EOD and biowar folks didnt even put their suits on.

My problem with the lead up to the fight is that EVERYTHING that the administration was pointing out as evidence of the next smoking gun/mushroom could have been interpreted that way...but only if one did not take the "simplest" and most reasonable explanation.

The Al tubes for instance. They could have been turned into parts for nuclear processing. But they were manufactored specifically to specs that met the needs of well what they were used for.

Robert

Posted by Robert G. Oler at May 10, 2007 06:43 AM

In Iraq we had a regime that was known to have WMD in the past and had a history of using them (Iran, Kurds, etc.) In the years prior to the invasion there was a general consensus in the world that the Hussein regime still had weapons programs. Given this backdrop why was it unreasonable to interpret the data to say that there were WMD when these interpretations were possible and plausible? Hindsight is 20/20, but I'd rather have false positives than false negatives.

Not to say that the intelligence community shouldn't work to avoid expectation bias as much as possible and to improve information gathering in general. But intelligence gathering is an uncertain business.

Posted by KeithK at May 10, 2007 12:26 PM

Hmmm, I forgot about the "mobile labs". So there was something that special forces could investigate.

Posted by Karl Hallowell at May 10, 2007 01:39 PM

Post a comment