Some folks just can’t let this drop. One of them is Walter Pincus of the Washington Post. And God bless him for it. In today’s paper, Pincus has an article detailing how two intelligence analysts responsible for what is probably the single greatest screw-up about Iraqi WMD (the aluminum tubes issue) have received job performance awards in each of the last three years.
It’s always important to avoid punishment or scapegoating not tied to specific malfeasance or poor performance. But, as this and other articles amply demonstrate, the screw-up tied to the aluminum tubes wasn’t just a bad call made with imperfect evidence. At a minimum, it also involved bad tradecraft on several fronts.
That each of these men could have been given such high commendations over the period of time in which their errors and poor performance became apparent makes it hard not to think that they were actually being intentionally rewarded for their flawed assessments. At a minimum, it demonstrates a complete indifference to any sort of accountability for a national embarrassment and scandal the magnitude of which the country has not even begun to come to grips with.
Almost across the board in this administration, the people responsible for this trail of error and/or untruth have been rewarded while those who resisted it or went along unwillingly have been marginalized, punished or fired.
It’s truly a national scandal — the surface of which has barely been scratched because the institutions with oversight responsibility have vested interest in not revealing what happened.
It’s a national scandal for which, as time goes by, we all collectively become more and more responsible.
