We must constantly review the quality of our work - Transcript of Tenet address on WMD intelligence
cont'd.....
As director of central intelligence, I also have an important responsibility. I have a responsibility to evaluate our performance, both our operational work and our analytical tradecraft.
<font size=4>
So what do I think about all this today? Based on an assessment of the data we collected over the past 10 years, it would have been difficult for analysts to come to any different conclusions than the ones reached in October of 2002.
However, in our business simply saying this is not good enough.<font size=3>
We must constantly review the quality of our work. For example, the National Intelligence Council is reviewing the estimate line by line.
Six months ago, we also commissioned an internal review to examine the tradecraft of our work on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. And through this effort we are finding ways to improve our processes.
<font size=4>
For example, we recently discovered that relevant analysts in the community missed the notice that identified a source that we had cited as providing information that in some cases was unreliable and in other cases fabricated.
We have acknowledged this mistake.
<font size=3>
In addition to these internal reviews, I asked Dick Kerr, a former deputy director of central intelligence, and a team of retired senior analysts to evaluate the estimate.
Among the questions that we as a community must ask are: Did the history of our work, Saddam's deception and denial, his lack of compliance with the international community and all that we know about this regime cause us to minimize or ignore alternative scenarios?
Did the fact that we missed how close Saddam came to acquiring a nuclear weapon in the early 1990s cause us to overestimate his nuclear or other programs in 2002?
Did we carefully consider the absence of information flowing from a repressive and intimidating regime, and would it have made any difference in our bottom-line judgments?
Did we clearly tell policy makers what we knew, what we didn't know, what was not clear and identify the gaps in our knowledge?
We are in the process of evaluating just such questions. And while others will express the views on these issues sooner, we ourselves must come to our own bottom lines patiently.
edition.cnn.com |
