National Security Archive Posts Third Kerr Report on National Intelligence and Iraq

Intelligence and Analysis on Iraq: Issues for the Intelligence Community, 29 July 2004; approved for release August 2005. (12 pages, PDF)

“This is the third in a series of reports by the Kerr Group (Richard Kerr, Thomas Wolfe, Rebecca Donegan, and Aris Pappas) supporting the Director of Central Intelligence’s evaluation and critique of intelligence and analysis associated with the war in Iraq that began in 2003. The analysis and judgments in this report were informed by the Group’s two previous reports…The Intelligence Community’s uneven performance on Iraq over the past two years has raised significant questions concerning the condition of intelligence collection, analysis, and policy support. This third report assesses the performance of the Intelligence Community from a broad perspective, focusing on systemic issues that channeled analysts’ evaluations and analyses. The discussion of shortcomings and failures in this report is not meant to imply that all surprises can be prevented by even good intelligence. There are too many targets and too many ways of attacking them for even the best intelligence agencies to discover all threats in time to prevent them from happening. Nonetheless, improving performance requires an acknowledgement of past mistakes and a willingness to change.”

National Security Archive Posts Third Kerr Report on National Intelligence and Iraq

Thank you!