In 2001, the U.S. Intelligence Community’s failed to anticipate or detect the 9/11 terrorist attacks and in the following year (2002) an Intelligence Community coordinated assessment erroneously concluded Iraq had an active Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) program. After these two intelligence failures, there was a broad consensus for a reexamination of how intelligence analysis is performed and the need for improvement of the U.S. intelligence community’s intelligence analysis.
The assigned readings — one from the 9/11 Commission report and another from the Iraq WMD Commission report — provide summary assessments of what the Intelligence Community’s analysts got wrong in both cases.
The 2004 Intelligence Reform Act (Public Law 108-458, December 17, 2004) gave the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) several responsibilities and authorities to implement policies and procedures to ensure accurate intelligence analysis mandated some specific different approaches to how the U.S. Intelligence Community does analysis. These responsibilities and authorities and specific reforms are summarized in the two-page attachment to this assignment.
Write a one-to-two paragraph essay, using complete sentences and proper grammar) that considers the 9/11 and Iraq WMD failures and whether the changes to intelligence analysis tradecraft in the Intelligence Reform Act of 2004 were what was needed, or not, to address these analytic failures
