Competition for funding as obstacle

Instead, the agencies set their sights
on targets that fit scenarios they believe will happen, failing to realize that
“anything that does happen, can happen. Intelligence reports tend to ignore
them if they don’t fit,” said John B. Alexander, a member of the Las Vegas
Chapter of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers.
Inherently, those charged with analyzing
intelligence information sometimes have “scotomas,” or areas of diminished
vision.
“They get this target ‘fixation,’ ” he
said. “Here’s the scenario. So we will look for data that support our proposed
scenario. So the ‘outliers’ fall off and don’t get incorporated into the
analysis. … These are things that they don’t believe can happen but do.”
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