ABSTRACT
Recent events in the domain of intelligence have highlighted the centrality of intelligence analysis for responding appropriately and effectively to threats to national security. In the wake of the intelligence failures associated with the September 11th 2001 attacks on the United States and with Iraq’s presumed Weaponry of Mass Destruction (WMD), several governments embarked on official inquiries – in the United States the 9/11 Commission 1 and Presidential Commission on US Intelligence Capabilities; 2 in Australia the Flood inquiry; 3 in Israel, the Knesset Foreign Affairs Committee [Shteinitz] enquiry; 4 in the United Kingdom, the Butler inquiry 5 – of unprecedented scale and comprehensiveness into their respective intelligence systems. The lessons learned, in all cases, emphasized the importance of intelligence analysis in national security tradecraft. A common finding was the urgent need for reliable, timely and actionable intelligence assessments for policy-makers; a common recommendation was to bolster up the analytical capacity of the intelligence services in order to avert repeated failures in future. Even Canada, which was not party to the military coalition against Iraq, saw fit nevertheless to issue its first-ever National Security Policy in April 2004, which called for an enhanced intelligence analysis capability to deal with contemporary threats from international terrorism. 6
