Learning is not occurring

Stick to the satellite photos, that’s my advice, they don’t lie. That’s how Scott Ritter, Andrew Wilkie and myself managed to get it right on the question of Iraqi nukes.

Right – humint is a waste of effort. Snapshots of the roofs of buildings provide all the information anybody could wish for.

And let me add my congratulations to your own: clearly you knew the truth about Iraq’s nukes program before the war! The time you put in poring over the data was well spent. The US government needs more advice from people like you.

You can always tell the character of a man from how he deals with adversity, a test by which the WMD crowd tend to come out pretty badly.

mandarin has clearly spent a lot of time practising saying “two plus two equals four” really sarcastically.

Wrong of me, I know, but it’s hard to stay patient with a student who believes that d + d = d squared.

Maybe it’s important, when dealing with humint, to read the attached label, like: “[…]but this informant should not be trusted because he has a clear interest in our invasion of the country”.
It’s just that those little labels were ignored for political purposes. And they are not included in press leaks either…

Or zero, one might snark if he didn’t admire dsquared’s blogging as much as I do.

What is this? Math class?

I find it amazing how the same information can teach totally different lessons to different people. Anti-war: This information is against what we believe, therefore, we must reiterate the lesson that it is innaccurate and cite evidence of other innaccuracies. Pro-war: This information proves our point, the pansy actions of the previous administration and the anti-war activism convinced the world that we are weak. That is why we were attacked and we must therefore learn from this that we should show our strength and resolve.

Two completely different lessons, same letter. Both sides choosing what to believe and not to believe. The real lesson here is in watching the actions of people with preconceived ideas and/or agendas. Ain’t life fun?

If my name was Daniel Plus-sign Davies, you might have a point. As it is, my initials are DD, hence d^2.

You should have written “if my name were.” But I doubt whether someone so flummoxed by mathematics is ready to confront the mysteries of the subjunctive.

If my name was Daniel Plus-sign Davies, you might have a point. As it is, my initials are DD, hence d^2.

I hasten to add that “Daniel Plus-sign Davies” would indeed be a ridiculous name. How much more sensible of you to be named “Daniel Multiplication-Sign Davies.”

I hasten to add that “Daniel Plus-sign Davies” would indeed be a ridiculous name. How much more sensible of you to be named “Daniel Multiplication-Sign Davies.”

As far as intelligence is concerned, what we’ve been getting from Iraqis isn’t humint, it’s gossip. I’m no expert, but if you’ve been getting a steady stream of lies from a group of sources, one should maybe cross them off the “reliable humint” list.

All stupidity from certain commenters aside, the assertion that “satellite pictures don’t lie” is completely and utterly incorrect. Oh, there are some things that they do very well – hard to hide the construction of a runway, or of a thousand ICBM launch sites, or of expansion at an existing military facility. But they’ll tell you nothing about what’s going on inside a building; their overflight times are known and predictable (with a few exceptions) which lets you hide some activities – Indian nuclear testing comes to mind. For telling if the research going on inside a lab is making progress on developing chemical or biological weapons, they are so close to useless as makes no difference.

I think that the bigger problem is that you cannot get perfect intelligence, but when you have people (either in the White House, on the Hill, or in the streets) demanding it, intelligence agencies calculate that they’ll get in less trouble for providing confident assesments that are wrong than for hemming and hawing and saying “we don’t know, but this is what we think.”

The agencies need to be more honest and the government needs to not treat sketchy intelligence as solid fact, and I think that the political sniping is wholly dependent on which side of the issue du jour the sniper is on.

Sooo…exactly when did you manage to get clearance to look at classified satellite images Daniel?

Please, HUMINT is an imporatant part of intelligence work. Even cops interrogate and rely on informatino from the “bad guys”. Not using or looking at this information is stupid.

You overstate your case then back off of it. Make up your mind.

Let the government twist and turn their dubious data as they will. When the smoke screen clears we’re once again left with a situation where the U.S. government launched a pre-emptive strike against an “enemy” which was not engaged in a war with us, not engaged in a war with an ally of ours, and not engaged in a war of any kind until we engaged it in a war.

There was no reason, no excuse, and no rationalization for that war. Not within the bounds or either security or morality. Not while many nations of the world are lead by vicious tyrants who are at least as bad as Hussain. Not while, even as we prepared to attack Iraq regardless of any U.N. “findings”, we were actually being threatened with (strongly implied) use of nuclear force against us by a nation which we knew for a fact not only has the weapons, but has a delivery system that can get those weapons within our boarders. You’ll notice that we didn’t attack them, as we didn’t attack the former U.S.S.R., and don’t attack China

You want proof that we knew Iraq did not have weapons with mass destructive abilities? Here it is: We did attack them.

If, as with Korea, we knew Iraq had nuclear weapons, or any ABC devices which could damage us or our allies, we would, as with Korea, still be pursuing diplomatic channels while trying our best to not get them too pissed off at us. We’d probably be asking Iran to talk sense into them, while secretly funding their own nuclear program.

We don’t “speak softly and carry a big stick”. We speak loudly as we run away from big sticks.

“I’m not sure this tells us anything except that intelligence is a most uncertain business.”
Posted by Jane Galt

I dunno. Perhaps a perceptive person, a smart person, trained in business and with Wall Street experience, might have learned that the present US administration can’t be trusted. Such a person should really be able of seeing that smoke and mirrors are that, even if they aren’t able to figure out what the truth is.

And when the same trick (selected unconfirmed leaks of interrogations of people who would be quite willing to say what their interrogators wanted to hear) is used a **second** time, anybody who can’t figure that out should really have their MBA recalled.

I’d add that a journalist should also have figured that out, or anybody in the US foreign service.

Of course, when alleged law professors find criminal investigations ‘too complicated’ to understand, why should we expect alleged MBA’s to do better?

To you, me and Daniel. Along with about 99% of the human population. I guess trolls use different notation.

In the same spirit, could I point out that you should have said “Yes, DD, you were right about Iraqi WMD” and “Yes, DD, you were right about consecutive symbols indicating multiplication”.

Yes, you could point this out. What’s going to stop you? The rhetorical construction you’re groping for requires the use of may (although the use of might might also be justified).

It would take a primitive mathematical education indeed (mine ended with the calculus) not to recognize the attempt to be clever represented by your Web handle. If you don’t mind, though, I will continue to think of you as “DD,” which emphasizes what a really enormous tit we’re dealing with here.

I’m baffled by Daniel’s comment. I wasn’t defending human intelligence or the invasion of Iraq for that matter. I agree with Daniel, we *don’t* know what was going on. That is my whole point. Deterrence works best when there is common knowledge. Bush made plenty of threats to Saddam and it appears that they were misinterpreted in very significant ways. American military might failed to deter him in critical regards. If evil dictators will be both crazy and stupid, we cannot expect them to always be deterred.

Media reporting of Iraq and the “war on terror” where the source is the military or the ruling elite of the day are like a double-blind.
How do you detect exactly where the fake-out is?
Who’s zoomin who has become an art form..

OK…I’m going to be a pain in the ass here.

The Iraqis actually did conceal a large enrichment facility from satillite photos: the EMIS plant at Al Tarmiyah. From the good old Federation of American Scientists website:

The Tarmiya site had no security fence and no visible electrical capacity; only later did inspectors discover that it was powered by a 30-kV underground electrical feed from a 150 MWe substation several kilometers away. Tarmiya was also situated within a large military security zone, thereby needing no additional perimeter security or military defenses at the site. At this same site, the Iraqis built a multimillion-dollar “chemical wash” facility for recovering uranium from refurbished calutron components. This facility was reportedly as sophisticated and clean as any in the West, and triple-filtered so as not to release any trace effluents into the atmosphere that might have led to its detection once it began operation.

Prior to the first IAEA inspection after the Gulf War, the only known nuclear facilities in Iraq were those at the Al Tuwaitha nuclear center, where nuclear material was being safeguarded. No other facilities were declared in the initial Iraqi statements. That the Tarmiya facility housed a substantial piece of the Iraqi nuclear program was only confirmed after the Gulf War in the early summer of 1991, when the movement there of large saucer-like objects (just prior to the first IAEA inspection of the site) led to the positive identification of the Iraqi calutron program. Much of the equipment at this site was disassembled unilaterally by Iraq, and the components hidden from IAEA inspector teams. These pasts were eventually turned over to IAEA personnel and destroyed in place.

from the page on the Tarmiyah facility.

However, the IAEA did find and destroy it under the first inspection regime in ’92. So unfortunately, in some cases satillite photos aren’t enough.

BUT the al Tarmiya plant was built back in the good old days before Gulf War version 1.0 and UNSCOM inspections and sanctions and no-fly zones and…well, you get the idea. How likely was it that Iraq could have built another facility like that under those conditions? Not very fucking likely (and I figured as much myself, if I may blow my horn here.)

Despite that, d-squared’s position on human intelligence from questionable sources holds. Just as satillite photos require interpretation, so human intelligence must be evaluated and verified. Specifically, how much should you trust refugees whose information would lead you to do something that’s to their benefit? Answer: not very much. Some people figured this out a long time ago, too.

Nabokov writes:

Perhaps containment, and inspection combined with a lotta wheeling, dealing and bribes and threats behind the scene is actally more cost-effective than pre-emptive invasion in getting a tinpot nation to dump its nasties.

Agreed. As the great Dr. Benway said, “I deplore brutality—it’s inefficient.”

In many cases of humanitarian catastrophe (Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda to name a few), reports by refugees, that were initially discounted, have turned out to be the most accurate descriptions of events. Assessing the credibility of reports, as any journalist, historian or intelligence officer is taught to do, is indespensible. Rumsfeld et al were taken for a ride by Chalabi and his defectors because it was a ride they wanted to take. As the above post about photographic intelligence demonstrates, all sources are fraught with potential deceptions. In my view Dsquared’s initial post is overstated.