A few weeks ago, I wrote that I didn’t care what the then-controversial National Intelligence Estimate said because the level of analysis that emanates from our intelligence community is uniformly wretched. I realized there was a possibility that our intelligence analysts might inadvertently stumble onto an insight. My point nonetheless was that if you really wanted to know what was going on in the world of Islamic Fascism, you’d be better of reading analysts like Walid Phares and the intrepid Steve Emerson who, unlike the intelligence community, know what they’re talking about and have been right on these matters for more than a decade. In other words, their concern with Radical Islam predated not only 9/11 but also the rise to prominence of Osama bin Laden. That, my friends, is quality analysis.

Predictably my indifference to the work product churned out by our intelligence community scandalized some of my critics. They called me arrogant; they couldn’t believe that I would so hastily disregard the commentary of our career analysts. Of course, these critics were the same people who most loudly condemned the intelligence community’s failures prior to 9/11 and the Iraq War, so their newfound faith in the government spook factory seemed somewhat suspect. Still, they were of a mind that all ordinary citizens should defer to the pros, especially when the pros are doing things like bashing the Bush administration and the war in Iraq.

It wasn’t like I was dismissing the intelligence community just because I sometimes disagreed with them. I had read the books by Michael Sheuer and other embittered former spooks and had walked away entirely unimpressed by their putative insights. They all shared the same worldview that anything that happened in the Islamic world was by definition a reaction to something America or the West did. They had no understanding of our enemy and, more damningly, zero comprehension that they had to get one. Fast.

IN TODAY’S NEW YORK TIMES of all places, my well-founded skepticism has been validated. Jeff Stein, the national security editor at Congressional Quarterly, writes how he’s made a habit in recent years of concluding interviews with government officials by asking them if they know the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite. The results have been uniformly dismaying if not surprising. A sample:

A few weeks ago, I took the F.B.I.’s temperature again. At the end of a long interview, I asked Willie Hulon, chief of the bureau’s new national security branch, whether he thought that it was important for a man in his position to know the difference between Sunnis and Shiites. “Yes, sure, it’s right to know the difference,” he said. “It’s important to know who your targets are.”

That was a big advance over 2005. So next I asked him if he could tell me the difference. He was flummoxed. “The basics goes back to their beliefs and who they were following,” he said. “And the conflicts between the Sunnis and the Shia and the difference between who they were following.”

O.K., I asked, trying to help, what about today? Which one is Iran — Sunni or Shiite? He thought for a second. “Iran and Hezbollah,” I prompted. “Which are they?”

He took a stab: “Sunni.”

Wrong.

Stein goes on to soften his critique by informing us that Hulon stays “up nights worrying about Al Qaeda.” Personally, I’d prefer he stayed up nights doing a little reading so he wouldn’t be operating under such a cloak of ignorance.

GEORGE W. BUSH, DONALD RUMSFELD AND DICK CHENEY are routinely excoriated for not taking every pronouncement from our intelligence community as if it were wisdom handed down directly from Mt. Sinai. I go in the other direction – if the people making the decisions of life and death actually care what these clueless intelligence analysts are saying, shame on them.

One of the many turf-wars Donald Rumsfeld has fought during the last six years has been over his desire to create a new intelligence service that would work under him at the Department of Defense. Is there any wonder why he would feel the old services are broken beyond repair?

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