Or it may have signaled real progress on the military and intelligence fronts about which the administration would have no interest in giving details that might prejudice continuing operations.
Disputes arose among prosecutors and American law enforcement and intelligence officers about which attacks against American interests could truly be attributed to Bin Laden — whether in fact he had, as an indictment eventually charged, trained and paid the men who killed the Americans in Somalia.
It also reports confusion among intelligence officials about which militias the U.S. could trust in Libya.
It seems likely that police chiefs will be frantically seeking at this time any intelligence about protests which are being planned by campaigners.
The Senate's report on prewar intelligence about Iraq, which asserts that warnings about its illicit weapons were largely unfounded and that its ties to Al Qaeda were tenuous, also undermines another justification for the war: that Saddam Hussein's military posed a threat to regional stability and American interests.
The Intelligence Squared public debates, about which The New Yorker did a Talk of the Town piece a couple years back, are pretty good.
Government officials have said that the commission's book-length report, which calls for the creation of a director of national intelligence to coordinate the work of the nation's 15 intelligence services, drew no conclusions about which administration was more to blame for intelligence and law enforcement failures before Sept. 11.
He said he would seek an "extremely important balance" for the 16 intelligence agencies, which employ about 100,000 people, suggesting that he would emphasize the soft power of diplomacy and economic development as well as the tougher counterterrorism efforts that got most attention under President Bush.
A police officer in the Duggan case is under investigation by the IPCC after allegedly failing to circulate intelligence about the gun which was linked to an incident in a Hackney barber shop a couple of weeks before Duggan was killed.
Artificial intelligence remains an intoxicating theory and a heady possibility, about which I am hardly qualified to speak.
