Wednesday, December 29, 2004

CIA: the overhaul continues

The CIA overhaul under Porter Goss continues. The latest underperforming bureaucrat to get the sack: Jami Miscik, the Deputy Director for Intelligence (DDI). The DDI's job: head up the analysis unit, the one that failed so miserably in the Iraq war run-up.

Here is a key snipet from the NYT article linked above:

Among those who have criticized the C.I.A.'s analytical unit for its mistakes on Iraq and that country's supposed unconventional weapons, the Senate Intelligence Committee issued a scathing report last summer, and a C.I.A. panel, the Iraq W.M.D. Review Group, completed a 10-month internal review last May.

That review, never made public but described in an internal document issued in August, concluded that the assertion that Iraq possessed illicit weapons had been reasonable based on the information available at the time. But the August document also showed that the review found a pattern of "imprecise language," "insufficient follow-up" and "sourcing problems," including "numerous cases" in which analysts "misrepresented the meaning" of intelligence reports about Iraq's weapons.

The August report described the analytical branch as having "never been more junior or more inexperienced" and said that some of the "systemic problems" uncovered might reflect more widespread "tradecraft weaknesses." But in an interview in September Ms. Miscik said she had acknowledged many of the problems in a speech in February 2004 and had put in place new measures requiring that intelligence judgments be subjected to more rigorous review.


In other words, the DDI's house was a mess. G'bye.

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