[JohnGalt]

"As far as we're concerned we've been entirely successful. That tyrant Saddam is gone and the Americans are in Baghdad. What was said before is not important. "

Ahmed Chalabi 2/19/04

[steve50]

Saw a report that claimed when we wanted to question his informants we were told they couldn't be found because they were in hiding. Nice to see he still wants to pay these people he can't find.

[lilylangtree]

Keep remembering how the military used the wrong street maps and ended up bombing the Chinese embassy in Sarajevo in '98-'99.

[Criminal Number 18F]

In the intelligence business two things are constant: your adversary does not want you to learn what you want to learn, and people lie to you. Indeed, most of the people you deal with are people you would not care to have courting your daughter, to put it mildly.

That doesn't prevent you from learning a lot of useful information. The Times has had a hardon for Chalabi for ages; he's key to their juvenile we-did-it-for-the-oil conspiracy. While Chalabi's guys reported stuff that agreed with many other sources, pre-war intelligence in Iraq depended on far more than these defectors. That the defectors had an agenda was understood by all that handled them and by all that read the reporting on same.

We had extensive information from human and technical sources on Iraqi WMD, which, in retrospect, was wrong. This is nothing new, it has happened before (think of the National Redoubt in WWII) and it will happen again because intelligence is a human activity and humans are imperfect creatures.

d.o.l.

Criminal Number 18F