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.
The strength of our nation’s data policy isn’t just in the rules we write, but in how effectively we translate those rules into a system that prioritizes the public good. Join us in this movement to design and build more resilient national data policies.
The human cost is measured in deaths. The financial cost is measured in the $52 billion taxpayers pay annually end stage renal disease – double NASA’s budget.
Gilman Louie, Longest Serving Board Chair of the Federation of American Scientists, Named Chair Emeritus
The proposed Office will resurrect the long-closed Office of Technology Assessment (OTA), the archive of which has been maintained by FAS for decades at https://ota.fas.org/.