The report notes that the Department of Energy—the U.S. agency most expert about nuclear-weapons hardware—disagreed with the widespread view on the part of other agencies that Iraq had purchased aluminum tubes in order to build centrifuges needed for enriching uranium. The DoE experts said the tubes weren't well-suited for that task and were more likely purchased for launching conventional artillery rockets, as the Iraqis were claiming. Nonetheless, DoE concurred with the general view that Iraq was "reconstituting" its nuclear-weapons program because "DoE didn't want to come out before the war and say [Iraq] wasn't reconstituting."

However, at other times, agencies—even experts—were simply wrong. On the same controversy, about the aluminum tubes, the National Ground Intelligence Center—the agency that's most expert about conventional army weapons—put forth the view that the tubes were not ideal for artillery and therefore must be meant for centrifuges. The report concludes, in an extremely detailed section, that the NGIC analysts just didn't know what they were talking about, didn't know enough about Iraq's previous involvement in rocketry or about the standards of aluminum tubes used by other armies. The NGIC, it states, "didn't do its homework."

No organizational reform can prevent people from being wrong.

In fact, the report goes further: "We have strong doubts that the broad reforms described in Part 2 will be enough to change the organizational culture of NGIC, Defense HUMINT [the human-intelligence branch of the Defense Intelligence Agency] and WINPAC [the CIA's Weapons-Intelligence, Non-Proliferation, and Arms Control Center]. Yet the cultures of each contributed crucially to the Iraq WMD debacle. We therefore recommend that the Director of National Intelligence give serious consideration to whether each of the organizations should be reconstituted, substantially reorganized, or made subject to detailed oversight."

Good luck on that one. It is extremely unlikely that a supra-manager—especially one with the limited statutory powers of the NID—could force such wholesale changes in such bedrock agencies of the permanent intelligence bureaucracy. CIA directors, secretaries of defense, and presidents of the United States have all tried and, for the most part, failed.