Juan Cole: Needed ... A Left-leaning "Team B" for Intelligence
It isn't surprising that Iraqi expatriates like Curveball should be trying to peddle a load of horse manure about Iraqi 'weapons programs' in the early zeroes.
It is not remarkable that Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress and its US enablers such as Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, John Hannah, David Wurmser, Scooter Libby, Richard Perle, Michael Rubin, Abram Schulsky, etc., should have been running a sting on US intelligence (and most of them have never even been investigated for criminal activity).
What is sad is that we pay $43 billion a year for intelligence, and intelligence analysis should have been about avoiding being stung, not about gullibly buying the horse manure and labeling it caviar to be consumed at all Washington's best cocktail parties.
Perle and Wolfowitz were big advocates in the 1970s of a Team B approach to intelligence on the Soviet Union, whereby you constitute a group of people to look again at the CIA estimates and see if you couldn't find evidence for a darker, more pessimistic picture.
It is obvious that would you actually need is a Team B that is skeptical from the Left.
Daily Kos, Talkingpointsmemo, Eschaton, many others listed below on the libads blogroll, and I, volunteer to do it for free. Is Washington listening?
First item: Let's Team B what is being said in the released official US intelligence on Iran.
It would be easy.
Read entire article at Informed Comment (Blog)
It is not remarkable that Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress and its US enablers such as Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, John Hannah, David Wurmser, Scooter Libby, Richard Perle, Michael Rubin, Abram Schulsky, etc., should have been running a sting on US intelligence (and most of them have never even been investigated for criminal activity).
What is sad is that we pay $43 billion a year for intelligence, and intelligence analysis should have been about avoiding being stung, not about gullibly buying the horse manure and labeling it caviar to be consumed at all Washington's best cocktail parties.
Perle and Wolfowitz were big advocates in the 1970s of a Team B approach to intelligence on the Soviet Union, whereby you constitute a group of people to look again at the CIA estimates and see if you couldn't find evidence for a darker, more pessimistic picture.
It is obvious that would you actually need is a Team B that is skeptical from the Left.
Daily Kos, Talkingpointsmemo, Eschaton, many others listed below on the libads blogroll, and I, volunteer to do it for free. Is Washington listening?
First item: Let's Team B what is being said in the released official US intelligence on Iran.
It would be easy.