BUB: Connecting the Dots

The Battlefield Update Brief points you toward some crucial failures of analysis

The Jordanian double (triple?) agent who bombed the CIA compound in Afghanistan appeared in a video made before the attack.

The Jordanian doctor who killed seven CIA employees in a suicide attack in Afghanistan said in a video broadcast posthumously Saturday that all jihadists must attack U.S. targets to avenge the death of Pakistani Taliban chief Baitullah Mehsud.
The video showed Humam Khalil Abu Mulal al-Balawi — whom the CIA had cultivated as an asset against al-Qaida — sitting with Mehsud's successor in an undisclosed location. It essentially confirmed the Pakistani Taliban's claim of responsibility for one of the worst attacks in CIA history, though a senior militant told The Associated Press that al-Qaida and Afghan insurgents played roles, too.

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The US military seems to have ignored their own evaluations of the Ft Hood shooter until it was too late.

A Defense Department review of the shooting rampage at Fort Hood, Texas, has found the doctors overseeing Maj. Nidal Hasan's medical training repeatedly voiced concerns over his strident views on Islam and his inappropriate behavior, yet continued to give him positive performance evaluations that kept him moving through the ranks.
The picture emerging from the review ordered by Defense Secretary Robert Gates is one of supervisors who failed to heed their own warnings about an officer ill-suited to be an Army psychiatrist, according to information examined by investigators conducting the study.
Hasan, 39, is accused of murdering 13 people on Nov. 5 at Fort Hood, the worst killing spree on a U.S. military base.
What remains unclear is why Hasan would be advanced in spite of all the worries over his competence. That is likely to be the subject of a more detailed accounting by the department. Recent statistics show the Army rarely blocks junior officers from promotion, especially in the medical corps.

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And yet, we're still wondering if the Army isn't over-reacting by detaining a soldier who recorded an angry and violent rap song about being stop-loss'ed.

An Army soldier is in a Georgia jail on charges that he threatened violence against his superiors in a rap song the soldier recorded to denounce the Army's "stop-loss" polic
Spc. Marc A. Hall has been jailed for a month on charges that he made threats, both in conversation with members of his infantry unit and in the lyrics to his song "Stop Loss."
Hall's song blasts Army policy for keeping him in uniform past his expected departure date. Hall also raps about grabbing a rifle to spray bullets and "watch all the bodies hit the floor."
Fort Stewart spokesman Kevin Larson said Monday commanders took the threats seriously. Hall's military attorney declined to comment.
A civilian attorney Hall contacted, Jim Klimaski, said the soldier intended no real violence.

An over-reaction? Or would we wonder about an under-reaction if he did go postal at some point?
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The BBC takes a peek behind the conspiracy curtain, questioning whether or not Osama bin Laden is alive or not.

Osama Bin Laden died eight years ago during the battle for Tora Bora in Afghanistan, either from a US bomb or from a serious kidney disease.
Or so the conspiracy theory goes.
The theory that has developed on the web since 9/11 is that US intelligence services are manufacturing the Bin Laden statements to create an evil bogeyman, to justify the so-called war on terror in Afghanistan, Iraq and back at home.
So is the world's most wanted man still alive?
For a decade, Osama bin Laden has managed to evade the world's superpower and the biggest manhunt in history.
Bruce Riedel, who chaired President Barack Obama's Afghanistan/Pakistan policy review, and who has seen the intelligence on Bin Laden, says the trail has not so much gone cold as "frozen over".
"We don't have a clue where he is," he says.
In the absence of any concrete intelligence, Bin Laden has become shrouded in myth and rumour.

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And former UN Ambassador John Bolton has some harsh words for the intelligence community (IC).

We are still paying the price for this bureaucratic insurrection, as information emerges about Iran's extensive efforts to conceal its nuclear program. Recent reports, for example, show that Qom is far from Iran's only hardened underground enrichment facility. So much is unknown about Iran's progress that the administration's confident estimates about the time available to engage in fruitless negotiations work in Tehran's favor.

Similarly, A.Q. Khan, proliferation's pre-eminent entrepreneur, reportedly believes that Pyongyang's clandestine uranium-enrichment began earlier and made more progress than many previously acknowledged. This and other new information, as recently explained by South Korea's foreign minister, runs counter to the biases of officials who have tried to minimize the risk from Pyongyang to justify six-party talks. Instead, it suggests that the North's repeated pledges to end its nuclear weapons program have been utterly worthless.

His solution?

The problem is often not the intelligence we collect, but assessing its implications. Solving that problem requires not the mind-deadening exercise of achieving bureaucratic consensus, but creating a culture that rewards insight and decisiveness. To create that culture we should abolish the DNI office and NIEs.

Eliminating the DNI should be accompanied by reversing decades of inadequate National Security Council supervision of the intelligence function. The council is an awesome instrument for presidential control over the IC, but only if the national security adviser and others exercise direction and control. Sloughing off responsibility to the bureaucracy embodying the problem is a failure of presidential leadership, and unfortunately gives us exactly the IC we deserve.

Your thoughts below!

By: Brant