Simon
01-08-04, 13:33
Uitgegeven: 1 augustus 2004 09:10
NEW YORK - Het terreurnetwerk al-Qaeda van Osama bin Laden is bezig met het plannen van zelfmoordaanslagen op bedrijven, grote openbare instellingen of internationale organisaties in New York. Dat meldden de nieuwszender ABC en The New York Times zondag.
Beide media meldden dat de politie en de federale autoriteiten op het gebied van terrorismebestrijding 'ongewoon bezorgd' zijn over de nieuwe informatie.
Volgens ABC hebben federale en plaatselijke politie informatie over dreigende aanslagen gekregen van buitenlandse bronnen. Die informatie zou duidelijker zijn dan "het gebruikelijke geklets" van terroristen dat anders onderschept wordt.
Dit meldt de New York Times ook zondag:
C.I.A. Plays It Safe by Accentuating the Negative
By MICHAEL. R. GORDON,
International Herald Tribune
A former intelligence officer once told me that when faced with a confusing mass of data the safest course of action was to emphasize the potential threat. If the danger turned out to be less grave than forecast, the policy makers would be relieved.
But if a serious threat indeed emerged, no one could accuse the intelligence community of having let the nation down. The analysts would not be raked over the coals for yet another "intelligence failure." Given the scrutiny the CIA has received in recent years, it is not surprising that some analysts would see this as a key to bureaucratic survival. U.S. intelligence analysts have been faulted for failing to anticipate India's series of nuclear tests, underestimating the capability of North Korea to make a three-stage missile and failing to foresee the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States. In the case of Iraq, it seems, the agency's analysts learned the lesson too well. Faced with a paucity of solid intelligence and confronting a regime schooled in the art of deception, the CIA filled in a sketchy picture in the darkest hues. As the recent Senate intelligence committee report makes abundantly clear, the CIA presented informed guesswork as established fact and drew far-reaching conclusions on the basis of a handful of unreliable sources. Rather than acknowledge how little firm information the American intelligence community had about Iraq's weapons programs, the CIA seems to have told 110 percent of what it knew. What made this approach so contentious is that it occurred while the White House was asserting the right to pre-emptive war.
It is clear that there are situations in which the United States may have to act in the face of less-than-perfect intelligence, as the White House has noted. "The greater the threat, the greater is the risk of inaction and the more compelling the case for taking anticipatory action to defend ourselves, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy's attack," President George W. Bush stated in his 2002 National Security Strategy. "To forestall or prevent such hostile acts by our adversaries, the United States will, if necessary, act pre-emptively." But the risks of inaction have to be balanced against the risks of overreaction: spending too many lives, too much time and too much treasure to cope with a second-order threat. In the case of Iraq weapons programs, U.S. intelligence was largely flying blind. There was a variety of reasons why Iraq was such a difficult case for the United States. Without a diplomatic presence in Baghdad, the United States found it hard to recruit agents. The CIA failed to recruit a single spy inside Iraq after 1998 to gather information about Iraq's programs to develop weapons of mass destruction. Instead, it leaned heavily on defectors and on the work of other nations' intelligence services. Iraq's long history of deception was another factor. The regime of Saddam Hussein seemed to have calculated that it could cooperate just enough with United Nations weapons inspectors to prevent the Security Council from authorizing military action, but not enough to dispel all of the ambiguity about its weapons programs. Iraqi scientists, for example, were discouraged from meeting privately with inspectors.
The Iraqi regime may have calculated that some uncertainty about the status of its weapons efforts might be useful in deterring rebellion at home and attack from abroad. As Hans Blix, the former chief UN weapons inspector, later said, you do not have to have a dog to put a sign outside your house that says "Beware of the dog." But it is also true that many CIA analysts made the assumption that Saddam had resumed his weapons programs after UN weapons inspectors left in 1998 and that this colored their analysis. To understand how the agency's assessment went awry it is useful to contrast the CIA's recent work with a case when one of its key officials got it right. As Iraq built up its forces near Kuwait in the summer of 1990, many Washington-based officials believed that Saddam's regime was engaging in a massive bluff or perhaps positioning itself for a limited land grab of Kuwait's northern oil fields.
But Charles Allen, the national intelligence officer for warning, put aside the assumptions about Iraq's strategy and focused instead on the specific steps Baghdad was taking. Noting the large logistical buildup, including the Iraqi government's decision to requisition trucks from the civilian sector, Allen challenged the government's assumptions and warned of a major attack against Kuwait. In the case of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, however, the CIA did the reverse. It allowed the widely shared assumptions about Saddam's intentions to be its guide. "Analysts interpreted ambiguous data as indicative of the active and expanded WMD effort they expected to see," the Senate report noted. One of the most telling examples cited by the Senate report is the conclusion in the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate that Iraq had renewed the production of poison gas and had stockpiled up to 500 tons of chemical weapons. This startling claim, which was widely accepted throughout the government, was not based on concrete information about the manufacture of poison gas.
NEW YORK - Het terreurnetwerk al-Qaeda van Osama bin Laden is bezig met het plannen van zelfmoordaanslagen op bedrijven, grote openbare instellingen of internationale organisaties in New York. Dat meldden de nieuwszender ABC en The New York Times zondag.
Beide media meldden dat de politie en de federale autoriteiten op het gebied van terrorismebestrijding 'ongewoon bezorgd' zijn over de nieuwe informatie.
Volgens ABC hebben federale en plaatselijke politie informatie over dreigende aanslagen gekregen van buitenlandse bronnen. Die informatie zou duidelijker zijn dan "het gebruikelijke geklets" van terroristen dat anders onderschept wordt.
Dit meldt de New York Times ook zondag:
C.I.A. Plays It Safe by Accentuating the Negative
By MICHAEL. R. GORDON,
International Herald Tribune
A former intelligence officer once told me that when faced with a confusing mass of data the safest course of action was to emphasize the potential threat. If the danger turned out to be less grave than forecast, the policy makers would be relieved.
But if a serious threat indeed emerged, no one could accuse the intelligence community of having let the nation down. The analysts would not be raked over the coals for yet another "intelligence failure." Given the scrutiny the CIA has received in recent years, it is not surprising that some analysts would see this as a key to bureaucratic survival. U.S. intelligence analysts have been faulted for failing to anticipate India's series of nuclear tests, underestimating the capability of North Korea to make a three-stage missile and failing to foresee the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States. In the case of Iraq, it seems, the agency's analysts learned the lesson too well. Faced with a paucity of solid intelligence and confronting a regime schooled in the art of deception, the CIA filled in a sketchy picture in the darkest hues. As the recent Senate intelligence committee report makes abundantly clear, the CIA presented informed guesswork as established fact and drew far-reaching conclusions on the basis of a handful of unreliable sources. Rather than acknowledge how little firm information the American intelligence community had about Iraq's weapons programs, the CIA seems to have told 110 percent of what it knew. What made this approach so contentious is that it occurred while the White House was asserting the right to pre-emptive war.
It is clear that there are situations in which the United States may have to act in the face of less-than-perfect intelligence, as the White House has noted. "The greater the threat, the greater is the risk of inaction and the more compelling the case for taking anticipatory action to defend ourselves, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy's attack," President George W. Bush stated in his 2002 National Security Strategy. "To forestall or prevent such hostile acts by our adversaries, the United States will, if necessary, act pre-emptively." But the risks of inaction have to be balanced against the risks of overreaction: spending too many lives, too much time and too much treasure to cope with a second-order threat. In the case of Iraq weapons programs, U.S. intelligence was largely flying blind. There was a variety of reasons why Iraq was such a difficult case for the United States. Without a diplomatic presence in Baghdad, the United States found it hard to recruit agents. The CIA failed to recruit a single spy inside Iraq after 1998 to gather information about Iraq's programs to develop weapons of mass destruction. Instead, it leaned heavily on defectors and on the work of other nations' intelligence services. Iraq's long history of deception was another factor. The regime of Saddam Hussein seemed to have calculated that it could cooperate just enough with United Nations weapons inspectors to prevent the Security Council from authorizing military action, but not enough to dispel all of the ambiguity about its weapons programs. Iraqi scientists, for example, were discouraged from meeting privately with inspectors.
The Iraqi regime may have calculated that some uncertainty about the status of its weapons efforts might be useful in deterring rebellion at home and attack from abroad. As Hans Blix, the former chief UN weapons inspector, later said, you do not have to have a dog to put a sign outside your house that says "Beware of the dog." But it is also true that many CIA analysts made the assumption that Saddam had resumed his weapons programs after UN weapons inspectors left in 1998 and that this colored their analysis. To understand how the agency's assessment went awry it is useful to contrast the CIA's recent work with a case when one of its key officials got it right. As Iraq built up its forces near Kuwait in the summer of 1990, many Washington-based officials believed that Saddam's regime was engaging in a massive bluff or perhaps positioning itself for a limited land grab of Kuwait's northern oil fields.
But Charles Allen, the national intelligence officer for warning, put aside the assumptions about Iraq's strategy and focused instead on the specific steps Baghdad was taking. Noting the large logistical buildup, including the Iraqi government's decision to requisition trucks from the civilian sector, Allen challenged the government's assumptions and warned of a major attack against Kuwait. In the case of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, however, the CIA did the reverse. It allowed the widely shared assumptions about Saddam's intentions to be its guide. "Analysts interpreted ambiguous data as indicative of the active and expanded WMD effort they expected to see," the Senate report noted. One of the most telling examples cited by the Senate report is the conclusion in the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate that Iraq had renewed the production of poison gas and had stockpiled up to 500 tons of chemical weapons. This startling claim, which was widely accepted throughout the government, was not based on concrete information about the manufacture of poison gas.