When the Intelligence Community releases before/after photos of some remote Syrian site that the Israelis bombed it doesn’t take long for a private company to release their own photos. The private company’s photos show that whatever the Syrians were doing there started as far back as 2001 and had progressed extremely slowly since 2003. Too bad. The Intelligence Community was trying to justify what Israel did and make some kind of horseshit link between North Korea and nuclear proliferation. And that’s the problem with sharing bogus intelligence information with the public. The public can debunk your crap and ruin everything. Fortunately, the Bushies have an answer. They’ll just stop making their intelligence assessments public. Maybe that way, Congress will fall for their lies.
National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell has reversed the recent practice of declassifying and releasing summaries of national intelligence estimates, a top intelligence official said Friday.
Knowing their words may be scrutinized outside the U.S. government chills analysts’ willingness to provide unvarnished opinions and information, said David Shedd, a deputy to McConnell.
He told congressional aides and reporters that McConnell recently issued a directive making it more difficult to declassify the key judgments of national intelligence estimates, which are forward-looking analyses prepared for the White House and Congress that represent the consensus of the nation’s 16 spy agencies on a single issue. The analysis comes from various sources including the CIA, the military and intelligence agencies inside federal departments.
Referring to the public release of the reports, Shedd said during a Capitol Hill briefing: “It affects the quality of what’s written.”
This is total baloney. We have a classification process to make sure that analysts can provide sensitive information to policy makers and Congress with very little risk. If the enemy shouldn’t know, then don’t declassify it. But the only reason to keep it all secret is if you don’t want to have to explain why your analysis was total bullshit, easily debunked in 10 minutes by anyone with a Google Earth search.
