[lbo-talk] WP: CIA analysts didn't know their sources

Jordan Hayes jmhayes at j-o-r-d-a-n.com
Thu Feb 12 10:57:51 PST 2004


Michael Pollak <mpollak at panix.com> writes:


> [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. [...]

At the CIA, the first rule is to think critically about information _knowing that you don't know where it came from_ -- if any of this is true (since we'll likely never know what kinds of changes actually occur, it's easy for Tenet to say _to the public_ "Well, we'll have to change that! It's obvious!" -- I guess it'd be nice to be able to tell armchair intelligence agents what's obvious), the "stupidity" involved is not that analysts don't get access to sources and methods, it's that they got away from how they were trained to work specifically without them.

/jordan



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