Word: pentagonal
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Over the past two weeks, TIME has interviewed several dozen current and former intelligence officials and experts at the Pentagon and CIA and on Capitol Hill to try to understand how the public version of the intelligence got so far ahead of the evidence. The reporting suggests that from the start the process was more deductive than empirical. According to these officials, three factors were at work...
...TREATING THE WORST-CASE SCENARIO AS FACT. One official said the process often went this way: the agency would send to the Pentagon three ways to interpret one piece of information, such as a new satellite photo or telephone intercept, and the Pentagon would always opt for the most dire explanation. This inclination accounts in part for the controversial conclusion by the Defense Department that Iraq's aluminum tubes were for the production of uranium for nuclear weapons. Seasoned experts at the Energy Department's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California disagreed, but their view--the most expert government interpretation...
...America's role in the world are congenitally disposed to overreact to every threat--which leads them to read too much into the intelligence. "They came in with a world view, and they looked for things to fit into it," says Lawrence Korb, who served in the Reagan Pentagon and now works at the Council on Foreign Relations. "If you hadn't had 9/11, they would be doing the same things to China...
...American war prisoner was freed from an Iraqi hospital on April 1, she immediately became a symbol of U.S. resolve, a much needed hero in a war that seemed in danger of bogging down. Now it seems certain that media accounts of her ordeal were distorted--and the Pentagon did little to set the record straight...
...recent BBC special has questioned the almost mythic quality of the Lynch story line. But in trying to show that the U.S. stage-managed the rescue, the British network may be guilty of exaggeration itself, with its claim that the Pentagon manipulated information to produce "one of the most stunning pieces of news management ever conceived." The key controversies...