http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A34541-2004Feb11.html
[This is almost beyond belief. The first rule of critical thinking is that you have to weigh the information according to where its coming from. And at the CIA, not only didn't they do it, they had a policy against it. And they specifically organized themselves to make it impossible.]
[Intelligence? We ought to rename it Stupidity.]
Thursday, February 12, 2004; Page A01 Washington Post
CIA Alters Policy After Iraq Lapses Analysts to Receive Details About Sources
By Walter Pincus Staff Writer
The CIA is making changes in how it handles intelligence after identifying specific problems in its disputed prewar assessment that Iraq's Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, officials said yesterday.
CIA Director George J. Tenet, whose agency's performance is under intense scrutiny, has ordered an end to the long- standing practice of withholding from analysts details about the clandestine agents who provide the information that analysts must evaluate, officials said.
The changes were ordered after an internal CIA review revealed several occasions when CIA analysts mistakenly believed that Iraq weapons data had been confirmed by multiple sources, when in fact it had come from a single source, Jami A. Miscik, deputy director for intelligence, said in a speech yesterday to the agency's analysts. The misunderstanding arose because CIA operatives had given analysts ambiguous information.
In other cases, Miscik said, analysts believed they were looking at information that came from a reliable source who had direct knowledge, but subsequent review showed the agent with the good reputation was actually supplying information from other parties "about whom we know little."
Tenet is "adamant this must change," Miscik told the analysts. "We are not brushing aside the agency's duty to protect sources and methods, but barriers to sharing information must be removed.
"Analysts can no longer be put in a position of making a judgment on a critical issue without a full and comprehensive understanding of the source's access to the information on which they are reporting," Miscik said, according to a text of her speech given to The Post.
Under the CIA's current system, analysts are told about the reliability of the source but get no other information, such as an explanation of the person's access to the information that he or she is providing. That is designed to protect agents' identities, but also has roots in a bureaucratic divide between the Directorate of Operations and the Directorate of Intelligence, the analytical side of the agency.
The moves are the first publicly known changes made to CIA operations in response to a cascade of criticism over the agency's prewar conclusions that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. No such weapons have been found, and several investigations are underway. President Bush has created a commission to probe the CIA record, and the intelligence committees in the Senate and House are also conducting reviews. Democrats, meanwhile, are demanding the investigations extend to whether top Bush administration officials exaggerated the intelligence findings to build a case for war.
Yesterday's moves show Tenet "is trying to get ahead of the criticism" of his agency, said one senior congressional aide with intelligence experience. Tenet will face public questioning on Capitol Hill in the first week of March when he is scheduled to give his annual report on worldwide threats.
"Criticisms will be pointed and harsh," Miscik told the analysts, and "while some of the criticisms will be unmerited, we have to recognize that many will be justified."
Miscik didn't specify what prewar information is now considered questionable, or what CIA weapons judgments might have been influenced by the data.
Analysts have long felt they needed to know more about sources of information -- not their names but rather whether they have first-hand, or less-direct, access to the information they are presenting, officials said.
"This is something the analysts have sought for years and have never been able to get," said one former senior agency analyst.
Miscik said analysts working on Iraq were sometimes misled into thinking more than one agent was involved because reports would describe a single source more than once and would use different descriptions each time.
In cases where analysts didn't realize they were looking at information from unproven sources, Miscik said, the spare information in the reports gave them no way of knowing.
Miscik also described another problem that has been revealed in the CIA's internal review: the reliance on "inherited assumptions," or failing to retest past intelligence conclusions as time goes on.
She called that issue "the single most important aspect of our tradecraft that needs to be examined."
When experienced analysts pass information on to newcomers, Miscik asked, "How do we ensure that we are not passing along assumptions that haven't been sufficiently questioned or reexamined?"
She suggested that analysts now need to apply that to other governments of interest. "How will China's newfound wealth change China's decision-making and the role it plays in world politics?" she asked.
Miscik also said there would be a review of the President's Daily Briefing, the bound book presented each morning to Bush with the most sensitive, latest overnight intelligence. Saying the PDB had been "dramatically revamped" in a way that "significantly improved the quality of the product" when Bush entered the White House, she said there would be a comparison with the material presented to President Bill Clinton "to see if some of the strong points of our earlier approach have been lost."
According to a senior intelligence official, the Bush version added "more sensitive operational information" and dropped some of the accompanying graphics that helped in understanding the substance of the material. In addition, the Bush PDB gets a more limited distribution within the agency, leaving some senior analysts unaware of what has been sent to the White House.