Walter Pincus had an important article in Saturday’s Washington Post, which will no doubt be lost in the holiday-weekend shuffle. That’s a shame; the piece highlights one of the most embarrassing flaws in the Bush administration’s approach to governing.
Two Army analysts whose work has been cited as part of a key intelligence failure on Iraq — the claim that aluminum tubes sought by the Baghdad government were most likely meant for a nuclear weapons program rather than for rockets — have received job performance awards in each of the past three years, officials said.
The civilian analysts, former military men considered experts on foreign and U.S. weaponry, work at the Army’s National Ground Intelligence Center (NGIC), one of three U.S. agencies singled out for particular criticism by President Bush’s commission that investigated U.S. intelligence.
The Army analysts concluded that it was highly unlikely that the tubes were for use in Iraq’s rocket arsenal, a finding that bolstered a CIA contention that they were destined for nuclear centrifuges, which was in turn cited by the Bush administration as proof that Saddam Hussein was reconstituting Iraq’s nuclear weapons program.
The problem, according to the commission, which cited the two analysts’ work, is that they did not seek or obtain information available from the Energy Department and elsewhere showing that the tubes were indeed the type used for years as rocket-motor cases by Iraq’s military. The panel said the finding represented a “serious lapse in analytic tradecraft” because the center’s personnel “could and should have conducted a more exhaustive examination of the question.”
Of all the pre-invasion fiascos, Bush’s misstatements about the aluminum tubes were among the most ridiculous. Two weeks before the State of the Union, the IAEA said that the tubes “were not directly suitable” for uranium enrichment. Months earlier, the Department of Energy had reached the same conclusion, as had intelligence experts at the State Department. A couple of analysts ignored the evidence, got everything wrong, and — true to form — get promoted.
It’s one thing to hold back on punishing analysts who make mistakes, but it’s another to reward those whose failures are the most spectacular.
No accountability, no responsibility, no reliability. The Bush gang has redefined government ineptitude.