Stovepiping
 Stovepiping  (activity)   | |
|---|---|
| Skipping several steps in a bureaucratic flow. While nominally done to get expedited decisions, the method is a used as a way to reach predetermined desired result. |
See also Compartmentalisation
Stovepiping is a technique of skipping several steps in a bureaucratic flow. While nominally done to get expedited decisions, the method is also used to skip steps in an investigation or report, in order to for example avoid technical analysis or opinions that would have contradicted the predetermined desired result.
Official narrative
Seymour Hersh wrote how
The point is not that the President and his senior aides were consciously lying. What was taking place was much more systematic-and potentially just as troublesome. Kenneth Pollack, a former National Security Council expert on Iraq, told me that what the Bush people did was 'dismantle the existing filtering process that for fifty years had been preventing the policymakers from getting bad information. They created stovepipes to get the information they wanted directly to the top leadership. Their position is that the professional bureaucracy is deliberately and maliciously keeping information from them.'[1]
Use
The Office of Special Plans (OSP), created by the George W. Bush administration stovepiped raw intelligence related to Saddam Hussein's government in Iraq to high-level Bush administration officials. Media analysis and professional analysts from other US government departments subsequently determined that many of the reports originated with dishonest sources or were untrue for other reasons (see Curveball), and the process of vetting would have prevented their reaching decision makers through normal channels. As one report stated, "The 2003 Iraq prewar intelligence failure was not simply a case of the U.S. intelligence community providing flawed data to policy-makers. It also involved subversion of the competitive intelligence analysis process, where unofficial intelligence boutiques 'stovepiped' misleading intelligence assessments directly to policy-makers and undercut intelligence community input that ran counter to the White House's preconceived preventive war of choice against Iraq."[2] The stovepiping by the OSP had the effect of providing a substantial portion of the untrue allegations that formed the publicly declared justifications for the 2003 Invasion of Iraq, such as allegations of collaboration with Al Qaeda and an ongoing program of weapons of mass destruction.[3]
Stovepiping is a procedure commonly used in aircraft investigations (such as those carried out by the NTSB) if there are deep political factors which those who controls the investigation wishes not to expose.
It was used to establish the claim that the Covid virus" escaped from a biolab in Wuhan, China.[4]
