[CLUE-Talk] Bush to order bipartisian review of Iraq allegations of WMD

[Randy Arabie]

Quoting "Timothy C. Klein" <teece at silverklein.net>:

> * Randy Arabie (randy at arabie.org) wrote:
> > > next year.
> > 
> > Whithout answering your question, I'd like to share this:
> > 
> >    The Logic of Intelligence Hype and Blindness
> > 
> >    Bruce G. Blair, Ph.D, CDI President, bblair at cdi.org 
> >    Dec. 11, 2003 (updated Dec. 30, 2003) 
> > 
> >    http://www.cdi.org/blair/intelligence.cfm
> 
> >
> > Mr. Blair took two recent intelligence "failures" (9/11 and Iraq WMD) 
> > and applied a rule of logic known as Baye's law to the pre-existing   
> > opinion of the intelligence community and a post-incident analysis of 
> > available intelligence and produced conclusions that were not only    
> > plausible but reasonable.                                             
> >
> 
> Heh.  That's the same statistical / probabilistic arguement that my spam
> filter uses.  It is not a perfect fit here.  Although I would call it
> Baye's Formula.
> 
> The bottom line for me is this: even if you accept completely that GWB
> and Blair acted in good faith (which I am not), *and* they the used
> sophisticated Bayesian analysis (which leaves aside the sticky issue of
> figuring out the probability of the known events), the fact is that they
> acted on incomplete information. When you do that, you are taking a risk.

Until something actually happens, you are forced to either act or not.  Only
after the fact do you have "complete information".  That's the big issue with
intelligence analysis.

In the case of 9/11 we didn't, and the intelligence community was "blamed" for a
failure.  In the case of Iraq, we did, and once again the intelligence community
is being "blamed" for failure.

> When it turns out you guessed wrong, you own up to it.
> 
> The current plan seems to be: Blame them!
> 
> That sucks, and I won't abide by it.

I don't see is so cut and dry.  I've heard people, both in and out of the Bush
Administration, acknowledging that the WMD question is a clear indicator of an
intelligence failure.

Is that "owning up to it"?  Maybe, I could understand someone arguing that it isn't.

Is that "blaming" the intelligence community?  I don't believe it is.  As Mr.
Blair analysis showed by applying a Bayesian model and logic to the available
data, one could justifiably come to the wrong conclusion in both cases (ie 9/11
and Iraq).
-- 
Allons Rouler!

Randy
http://www.arabie.org/