The intelligence failure behind the 2003 war, as it came out: Curveball, the Iraq Survey Group, the Niger uranium story and what the inspectors had already found.
Former Iraq Survey Group head David Kay testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee that “we were almost all wrong” about Iraq. He had earlier explained that the U.S. intelligence community was fooled by the “vortex of corruption” in Iraq…
MoveOn.org has a new ad out that works Rumsfeld over his claim that neither he nor the President described Iraq as an imminent threat. Tom Friedman confronts Rumsfeld with two quotes from the SECDEF using “imminent” and “immediate,” leaving SECDEF…
Rod Barton (right) is an Australian microbiologist who served on the Iraq Survey Group (click here for Charlie Duelfer’s letter of gratitude). Barton has given an interview to an Australian television program, Four Corners, about his time on the ISG.…
You’ve likely noticed that the office of Representative Henry Waxman (D-CA) released a letter describing State Department efforts to “conceal unclassified information about the role of John Bolton … in the creation of a [December 2002] fact sheet distributed to…
Dafna Linzer—writing the Washington Post—notices that the WMD Commission reveals that UNMOVIC inspections in February 2003 discredited “Curveball”—the defector whose claims about mobile bio-weapons made a liar out of Colin Powell: That Iraq was cooking up biological agents in mobile…
Nature reports that the US bungled post-war interrogations of Iraqi scientists, to the detriment of US nonproliferation goals. In his memoir, Iraqi centrifuge engineer Mahdi Obeidi recounts a series of Kafka-esque events that ensued after he tried to contact Coalition forces.
AP Special Correspondent Charles J. Hanley has a readable, accessible summary of the Iraq WMD debacle in the Guardian. Hanley opens with an anecdote that I haven’t seen before: Beneath the giant dome of a Baghdad palace, facing his team…
The world knows what successful cooperative disarmament looks like. When a country decides to disarm, and to provide to the world verifiable evidence that it has disarmed, there are three common elements to its behavior: The decision to disarm is…
A quick follow-up to Jeffrey’s post about intelligence and political pressure. Paul Pillar, former National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia, said during a 7 March CFR appearence: MR. BASS: In your Foreign Affairs piece, you talk…
People often ask me why, as a philosophy major, I ended up in this particular field. I was an epistemologist — someone who studied knowledge and justified belief. The art of intelligence is, in that way, a massive exercise in…
“ ‘Where did this intel come from? Did we get it from the UN?’ ‘No, it’s been vetted by the US Government.’ ” Or words to that effect, I don’t have a transcript for the movie The Green Zone. I’m…
President James K. Polk’s war of choice against Mexico from 1846-48 resulted in the acquisition of what became the states of California, Utah and Nevada, as well as parts of New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, and Wyoming. Mexico received $15 million…
