I bet a significant portion of this data comes from Twitter. Who says twitter can't be profitable? Just charge the government a $1 million dollar "early warning unrest" fee!
Given the fact that they misjudged every coup, revolt and civil unrest since the bay of pigs i find it highly doubtful.
The only time the CIA came close to accurately predicting a regime change is when they cause it and even then they can't be sure if they'll still play ball.
Intelligence doesn't work on large scales with many variables this is what makes mass surveillance worthless.
Humint works when you have case officers dedicating their life to study a single tasked asset and even then they are only slightly more accurate than tossing a coin.
Sorry but as an agency that misread the fall of the Soviet Union and more recently the Arab spring I would be keeping my mouth shut in shame.
This isn't to say that the CIA is not relevant and that their officers aren't doing a good job, their crystal balls do need realignment tho.
Oh and didn't really do a great job about preventing 9/11...oh and stupidly helped turn Al-Qaeda core (about 120 people) into an ideology...oh and didn't really do an awful lot to predict and prevent ISIS.
I'm not sure how much they got themselves manipulated, Iraq isn't a clear cut case as many people would like to believe.
Saddam worked hard to make sure that the west thinks he has WMDs ready to use (and that he is willing to use them) he kicked out inspectors, he staged activity at sites that were decommissioned and suspected sites, and he had his troops marching in NBC suits.
And the US and the Iraqi government does still finds chemical weapons spread over Iraq, the US has recovered 1000's of chemical munitions over the years.
Large amounts of precursor material and known stockpiles have also went missing during the invasion, some of it has been suspected as the source of the reported chemical attacks in Syria.
And overall the condition of these weapons made them not particularly field ready especially considering that the Iraqi army was in a state of total collapse even prior to the invasion, Saddam put a show that oddly he didn't had too.
Iraq didn't had nukes, but it had plenty (as in more than enough to cause a lot of nasty incidents, but not nearly enough to sustain a war) of chemical weapons during the time of the invasion even if they were at a pretty degraded state, and Saddam staged a pretty good show in an attempt to thwart a looming US invasion.
Saddam's WMD's were never a threat to the US, not to any extent beyond it's regional presence, and it likely not have been a real threat to the region at large (yes he could've killed a lot of people, but conventional weapons work just as well for that matter), but it's also not a case of these things being non-existent.
The intervention in Iraq is probably one of the best examples that the road to hell is paved with good intentions in recent history, it can be judged by many factors as unwarranted and counterproductive but it wasn't some conspiratorial scheme by the "neocons".
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 44.7 ms ] threadIt's important.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colour_revolution
The only time the CIA came close to accurately predicting a regime change is when they cause it and even then they can't be sure if they'll still play ball.
Intelligence doesn't work on large scales with many variables this is what makes mass surveillance worthless.
Humint works when you have case officers dedicating their life to study a single tasked asset and even then they are only slightly more accurate than tossing a coin.
Sorry but as an agency that misread the fall of the Soviet Union and more recently the Arab spring I would be keeping my mouth shut in shame.
This isn't to say that the CIA is not relevant and that their officers aren't doing a good job, their crystal balls do need realignment tho.
Saddam worked hard to make sure that the west thinks he has WMDs ready to use (and that he is willing to use them) he kicked out inspectors, he staged activity at sites that were decommissioned and suspected sites, and he had his troops marching in NBC suits.
And the US and the Iraqi government does still finds chemical weapons spread over Iraq, the US has recovered 1000's of chemical munitions over the years.
https://theintercept.com/2015/04/10/twelve-years-later-u-s-m...
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/10/14/world/middleea...
Large amounts of precursor material and known stockpiles have also went missing during the invasion, some of it has been suspected as the source of the reported chemical attacks in Syria. And overall the condition of these weapons made them not particularly field ready especially considering that the Iraqi army was in a state of total collapse even prior to the invasion, Saddam put a show that oddly he didn't had too.
Iraq didn't had nukes, but it had plenty (as in more than enough to cause a lot of nasty incidents, but not nearly enough to sustain a war) of chemical weapons during the time of the invasion even if they were at a pretty degraded state, and Saddam staged a pretty good show in an attempt to thwart a looming US invasion. Saddam's WMD's were never a threat to the US, not to any extent beyond it's regional presence, and it likely not have been a real threat to the region at large (yes he could've killed a lot of people, but conventional weapons work just as well for that matter), but it's also not a case of these things being non-existent.
The intervention in Iraq is probably one of the best examples that the road to hell is paved with good intentions in recent history, it can be judged by many factors as unwarranted and counterproductive but it wasn't some conspiratorial scheme by the "neocons".
Cheney wanted to "finish the job", and was able to use the post-911 chaos to push it through.
Chemical weapons are available in a variety of "bad" or potentially "bad" places. Yet the United States hasn't invaded any of those places.