Water Pincus writes in today’s Post:
Two Army analysts whose work has been cited as part of a key intelligence failure on Iraq — the claim that aluminum tubes sought by the Baghdad government were most likely meant for a nuclear weapons program rather than for rockets — have received job performance awards in each of the past three years, officials said.
The civilian analysts, former military men considered experts on foreign and U.S. weaponry, work at the Army’s National Ground Intelligence Center (NGIC), one of three U.S. agencies singled out for particular criticism by President Bush’s commission that investigated U.S. intelligence.
Now, I can’t bring myself to be shocked that the guys who were blamed for the president’s war received promotions — I don’t doubt that’s part of the deal. But NGIC? NGIC? Here in Charlottesville?
Most people in the area are familiar with the National Ground Intelligence Center. For years they were right downtown, with a weird mesh thing over the windows that was reputed to reflect microwaves to prevent some kind of crazy scatter-bounce-sonic eavesdropping thing from happening. When a friend and I were making a documentary of downtown in the mid 90s, we made the mistake of filming the NGIC (IN-jick) building. The guards were visibly agitated. We ran.
But if you were to ask anybody in Charlottesville what NGIC does, you’d be greeted with silence. It’s not regarded as a CIA-spooky kind of a thing — just a bunch of affable people doing jobs that are presumably both top-secret and utterly boring. Nothing anybody would care about. After all, it’s in Charlottesville — how important could it be? (In 1979, the U.S. Senate commissioned a study about the effects of nuclear war, which included a detailed fictional piece envisioning what Charlottesville would be like after a nuclear war (PDF) — perhaps the selection of Charlottesville for NGIC’s placement is precisely because we’re so far from anything of import.)
A few years ago, NGIC moved out to new headquarters, just outside of Charlottesville, putting them somewhat farther from the minds of Charlottesvillians. If this Post story develops any traction, though, it would certainly be the first time in my memory that anybody around these parts paid any mind to NGIC.