Gordon Carrera

They all thought Iraq had the WMD.

But there is something different about going to war

On that basis, to make the decision to go to war and to use that as the basis for going to war when it's not true.

And I think that is deeply consequential and disturbing for lots of reasons.

Whereas actually, I think it was a more fundamental intelligence failure.

Politicians were pressing the intelligence agencies for evidence to back something up, which they wanted to be true and thought was true.

But it is the job of an intelligence agency-

to resist political pressure.

So I think it's back to the, what is the intelligence failure?

I think there's three failures.

There's the failure of analysis, the assumptions.

There's the failure of collection.

So that's the kind of new sources on trial, failure to validate, the failure to vet.

And then there's a failure in the relationship between intelligence agencies and politicians in a failure to perhaps say to the politicians,

This is the limit of the intelligence.

Don't go beyond that here and no further.

This is what we know.

This is what we know with confidence.

This is what we don't know with confidence.

And I think that is also the responsibility of intelligence agencies to do that with their political masters and to some extent to resist pressure.