Intelligence Gap, Indeed!

Well, here is an ironic headline from the NYT's:

Inquiry on Intelligence Gaps May Reach to White House

My immediate reaction was : No Shit!

The recent report put out by the IG in DOD on the lying liars is reported thusly by the Times:

The chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee said Friday that he would ask current and former White House aides to testify about a report by the Pentagon’s inspector general that criticizes the Pentagon for compiling “alternative intelligence” that made the case for invading Iraq.

The chairman, Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, said that among those called to testify could be Stephen J. Hadley, the national security adviser, and I. Lewis Libby, a former chief of staff for Vice President Dick Cheney. Both received a briefing from the defense secretary’s policy office in 2002 on possible links between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s government.

In its report on Thursday, the acting inspector general, Thomas F. Gimble, found that the work done by the Pentagon team, which was assembled by Douglas J. Feith, a former under secretary of defense for policy, was “not fully supported by the available intelligence.”

It was not clear whether Mr. Hadley and Mr. Libby would testify. The White House normally resists having top aides testify before Congress.

The Senate Intelligence Committee may also seek to question the men. Tara Andringa, a spokeswoman for Mr. Levin, said Mr. Levin planned to consult with Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, Democrat of West Virginia and chairman of that committee. Mr. Levin is on both committees.

The inspector general’s report found that while the Feith team did not violate any laws or knowingly mislead Congress, it made dubious interpretations of intelligence reports and shared them with senior officials without making clear that its findings had already been discounted or discredited by the main intelligence agencies.

“The actions, in our opinion, were inappropriate, given that all the products did not clearly show the variance with the consensus of the intel community, and in some cases were shown as intel products,” Mr. Gimble told the Armed Services Committee in a hearing on Friday.

So, the Whitehouse uses Intel that had already been discredited and discounted by the Intel community. There wasn’t a Gap in the Whitehouse, though an actual Intelligence Gap in the Whitehouse on most things is a priori. The Whitehouse was counting on an Intelligence Gap in the Main Steam Media. And how right they were! That Gap lead to an Intelligence Gap in the American Public which lead to an Intelligence Gap in the War on Iraq.

General Franks is reported to have said about Feith: "the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth."

I would suggest that he wasn’t the stupidest guy on the face of the earth. I would suggest that many of those in the Main Stream Media were. After all, Feith got them to go along with his dog and pony show.

So, will there be an Intelligence Gap in the War on Iran?