The REAL story of the NIE

Contributed by: filbert Sunday, October 01 2006 @ 09:42 AM CST

That's "National Intelligence Estimate."  You know, the one that says whatever the reader wants to read into it?

That's the problem, as Herbert Meyer points out at the American Thinker:
Some sentences in the Key Judgments contradict themselves, and some are trite ("We judge that groups of all stripes will continue to use the Internet . . . ").  Others are classic examples of the "on the one hand, on the other hand" syndrome.  And still others are simply unintelligible -- they are neither right nor wrong, but written in a way to make them subject to whatever interpretation the reader wishes to make.

No issue is more important to our country’s security than the future of terrorism, and nothing could be more helpful to the President than a clear and accurate projection of what that future is likely to be.  That is what this NIE should have provided, but doesn’t.

Now you see the "secret" that the Key Judgments of this NIE inadvertently reveal -- and it isn’t about Iraq or about the future of terrorism.  It’s about our own intelligence service, and what this NIE has revealed is that our radar is busted.  That’s frightening, and what’s even more frightening is the realization that if we know it, so too do our enemies.
The National Intelligence Estimate is supposed to be the best available advice to the President regarding the issue being studied.  If all the intelligence community can do is "on the one hand--on the other hand" non-advice, it's worse than useless.  It's a waste of time and money.

Those who complain the loudest about this President's foreign policies should be demanding better, more definitive reports from the intelligence community, instead of using that very same milquetoast "advice" as some kind of Holy Grail of received wisdom from on high.

The advice our President is receiving from the intelligence community is garbage.  And, as we all know, garbage in, garbage out.


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Medary.com - The REAL story of the NIE
http://www.medary.com/article.php/20061001104217350