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Issue: 8/16/04 People Should Have Been Fired By Shaun Waterman The man who led the fruitless hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq told a Senate panel Wednesday that reforming the nation's intelligence agencies would not fix their flaws unless those individuals responsible for failure were made personally accountable. "Intelligence reform without accountability will not achieve the objective we all share -- that is avoiding the clearly avoidable tragedy of Sept. 11 and the equally avoidable tragedy of a botched assessment of Iraq's (weapons of mass destruction) capabilities," Dr. David Kay told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The committee held a rare August recess hearing -- one of an unprecedented series in both chambers of Congress -- to consider calls from the Sept. 11 Commission for a radical restructuring of the 15 U.S. intelligence agencies, especially the appointment of a new national intelligence chief with the authority to manage the nation's spies. Kay told the panel that the U.S. intelligence system was in a crisis "so grave that it weakens an essential underpinning of both our diplomatic and our national military security capabilities and their ability to support U.S. national interests." But Kay said that the roots of the crisis did not lie exclusively in structural problems. The inaccurate assessments of Iraqi unconventional weapons capabilities in particular were, he argued, "an overwhelming systemic failure of the Central Intelligence Agency." "Until this is taken on board," he continued, "and people and organizations are held responsible for this failure, I have a real difficulty in seeing how a national intelligence director can correct these failings." He said that the most frustrating moment of his failed hunt for stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was when he learned that the nuclear analysts were to get larger performance bonuses than the chemical-biological analysts, even though the nuclear conclusion -- that Iraq had reconstituted its atomic weapons program -- had turned out to be even more drastically wrong. Kay said that the record of the nuclear analysis was one of "abuse of authority, a failure to use expertise." "There is nothing in that record that ... deserves a performance bonus. Nor in fact, quite frankly, was there much that deserved a performance bonus in the chemical and biological area. "Instead of holding people responsible," he concluded, "we reward them for failure." The final report of the Sept. 11 Commission -- formally known as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States -- has been criticized by relatives of the victims and others because it does not allocate responsibility to specific individuals, instead focusing on systemic problems like the absence of a single leader for the nation's intelligence system. Commission members have said repeatedly that there is plenty of blame to go around and that their job was to find out what had gone wrong, rather than point fingers. But Kay came down firmly against such an approach Wednesday. He said the reform process would fail to address the real problems, "particularly if we continue to say 'Everyone is at fault, therefore no one can be held responsible.'" Shaun Waterman is Homeland and National Security Editor for UPI, a sister news service of Insight. Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector. ======================================================================== Archives Available at: http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]/ <A HREF="">ctrl</A> ======================================================================== To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Om |
