Lex at Neptunus Lex ("The unbearable lightness of Lex. Enjoy!") takes us into some "inside baseball" at the high end of the intelligence community.
Money quote(s):
"For years, intelligence agencies at home and abroad have watched the nuclear program in Iran with growing concern. In 2007, a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) provided to policy makers by the intelligence community deprecated that threat, saying that Iran had stopped work on its weaponization program in 2003. There were concerns at the time that the NIE had been deliberately shaded by members of the IC to forestall a rumored attack on Iranian nuclear sites by the George W. Bush administration in its waning years."
This was hardly the first NIE whose conclusions seemed policy- (or politics) rather than intelligence-driven, but it's one of the more prominent ones.
"(A) veteran CIA analyst critical of the agency’s 2011 NIE says that the agency has prevented him from revealing the names of outside analysts who reviewed the draft"
Why is that important?
Outside analysts such as academics, think-tankers, and former intelligence officials are used as a form of outside validation. Publicizing those names makes them accountable for that validation.
"Critics have long claimed, with little supporting evidence, that the Bush administration deliberately politicized intelligence in order to justify the Iraq war. At worse, the intelligence community in 2002 was guilty of “confirmation bias”: Told to look for evidence of an Iraqi WMD program, analysts found what they were looking for in the tangled mess of pre-war all-source data and disregarded what didn’t fit the picture. It was a costly, if understandable mistake. Using outside analysts to endorse a position on Iranian nuclear weapons which is clearly at odds with the evidence, and who have evident biases of their own may be just as costly, if not more so."
It's nice to read something outside the specialist literature that touches on the problems of cognitive bias in intelligence analysis. Confirmation bias isn't something you set out to have, although it's something you maybe could have perhaps avoided.
