Inexplicably — perhaps due to mistaken intelligence regarding the Union position — General Floyd reversed course in the middle of the escape and retreated back into the surrounded trenches.
With some relief, administration officials said the report had also found no evidence that political pressure from the White House or Pentagon contributed to the mistaken intelligence.
Against a backdrop of spirited debate and boisterous dissent, Prime Minister Tony Blair on Wednesday defended his decision to go to war in Iraq, saying that he was ready to take responsibility for his actions before the country while asserting that freedom and democracy in Iraq were more important than any mistaken intelligence.
The detention of these men - presumably most of them Muslim - was illegal, and in many instances based on mistaken intelligence, but the program of abuse that they were subjected to was not.
Wasn't it possible that what others mistook for intelligence was in fact only a sort of mutation of the will?
But make no mistake: the intelligence-led struggle fought in our name is, at its core, every bit as gritty and as visceral as conventional combat.
"Instead, I let him ask me, 'What do you need?' " The result, he said, was that "we made the biggest mistake in the intelligence business: we identified all of our gaps".
Israeli officials said that an intelligence mistake led to the killing of the wrong five Palestinians in an ambush on Monday of a checkpoint in Beituniya in the West Bank.
Extreme fear of one type of intelligence mistake, however, has repercussion not only on the likelihood of committing the other type of error but in the value of information and the methods used to obtain it.
The former Baathists - who are said to be leading ISIS - were ousted from Iraq together with Saddam when the West was "absolutely certain" that he possessed weapons of mass destruction - an "intelligence mistake" as Tony Blair recently defined it.
