Artificial intelligence.

• Author: Peters, Charles
• Position: Tilting at Windmills - Brief article

"By the fall of 2003, the [Baghdad CIA] station had just four officers who could speak Arabic." This was two years after 9/11, 10 years after the first attack on the World Trade Center by terrorists whose plans were revealed in documents possessed by the FBI since well before the attack, but which the FBI did not have the language competence to translate, and after frequent criticism by this magazine and others of the linguistic inadequacies of both the FBI and the CIA. Furthermore, "many [of the staff] were rookies, often on their first overseas assignment."

These facts come from James Risen's new book, State of War, which also reveals that, for the first nine months after we took...