Re: Re[2]: French ruling party having a riot on the Internet

[Valdis.Kletnieks () vt edu]

On Wed, 09 Nov 2005 10:01:07 CST, Paul Schmehl said:

> ALL the intelligence agencies that I am aware of, including Jordan, 
> Russian, France, Germany, England, the US, Israel and Egypt ALL agreed that 
> Saddam had WMD.  Were they correct?  No!  But that doesn't change the fact 
> that prior to the war every single one of them came to the same conclusion 
> based upon the evidence they had possession of.

And how many of those intelligence agencies added into their mix whatever
shared data the US gave them?  Remember, data sharing *does* happen between
those agencies - and which is more plausible, that all 7 of the countries
you named did their own totally independent data gathering and analysis, and
got the wrong answer, or that one gathered bogus data and shared it?

> Well, that's incorrect as well.  To date there have been four separate 
> commissions that have looked in to the pre-war intelligence and its 
> handling and *all* four have concluded that there was no pressure put upon 
> the agencies by the administration and the intelligence was not "twisted" 
> to fit a preconceived outcome.

1) Verify who authorized the commissions and chose the members.  Remember that
there is no fundamental law (such as gravitation or conservation of energy)
that says that a commission is infallible and their product is correct - they
are subject to many of the same errors of research, interpretation, and bias
that the agencies they are investigating made...

2) Verify that the commissions weren't fed laundered info, or that subtle
semantic games aren't being played here.  The fact that the analysts didn't
produce slanted  product doesn't mean that policy makers didn't do very careful
cherry-picking of the product to support their notions.

> These are facts.  All else is opinion.

When dealing with the intelligence community, saying something is "a fact"
almost always means there's a hidden agenda behind it.  Remember that's exactly
how we got *into* this mess - somebody said something was "a fact".

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