To its credit, the Defense Intelligence Agency promptly withdrew an official DIA history that mistakenly described the 1981 Israeli attack on an Iraqi nuclear reactor in the 1980s as an attack on Iran. As soon as the error became public, DIA replaced the entire document with an updated account.
In an email message yesterday to Israeli author Gideon Remez, who discovered the error, DIA webmaster David Baird wrote: “You are correct that the historical fact is wrong. We did not realize it until you pointed it out. We are taking steps to correct it.”
By yesterday afternoon, the 1996 “Defense Intelligence Agency: A Brief History” (pdf), which contained the error, had been replaced on the DIA web site by a 2007 “History of the Defense Intelligence Agency” (pdf). Both documents can be found on the FAS web site.
January saw us watching whether the government would fund science. February has been about how that funding will be distributed, regulated, and contested.
This rule gives agencies significantly more authority over certain career policy roles. Whether that authority improves accountability or creates new risks depends almost entirely on how agencies interrupt and apply it.
Our environmental system was built for 1970s-era pollution control, but today it needs stable, integrated, multi-level governance that can make tradeoffs, share and use evidence, and deliver infrastructure while demonstrating that improved trust and participation are essential to future progress.
Durable and legitimate climate action requires a government capable of clearly weighting, explaining, and managing cost tradeoffs to the widest away of audiences, which in turn requires strong technocratic competency.