They are a bit pricey, Werner, but as the saying goes "If one thinks
education is expensive, one should try ignorance"...  ;-)

Along that line, I ran into the item below in Frobes the  other day.

Very best!
Joe


U.S. Intelligence: How Bad Is  It?
Robert David Steele 04.18.06, 6:00 PM  ET



How inept is our secret national intelligence bureaucracy? Here is an
example:
In August 1995, at the request of the Aspin-Brown Commission, which wanted to
 test secret against open sources, I called five private-sector information
providers and asked them to provide the commission, overnight, with as much
information as possible about the civil-war-torn nation of Burundi. After one
working day, they provided the following:
* From Oxford Analytica, 20 two-page executive reports on  the
political-military implications of Burundi, Rwanda, and the attendant  genocide, for the
United States, the United Nations and Africa in general.
* From Jane's Information Group, concise tribal orders of  battle created
over the weekend and one-paragraph summaries of every article  they had ever
published on that conflict.
* From East View Cartographic, a complete list of all  immediately available
Russian military maps with contour lines at very fine  levels of detail (today
the U.S. still lacks such printed maps for 90% of the  world--if computers
fail due to bullet holes or moisture or sand, our troops  literally go blind).
* From Lexis-Nexis, a list of top journalists who cover  Burundi, all
immediately available for a detailed debriefing.
* From the Institute of Scientific Information, a list of  the top academics
in the world on all aspects of the conflict, the tribes and  the conditions,
each immediately available for debriefing.
* From Spot Image, complete commercial imagery for all of  Burundi, less than
three years old, cloud free, at a very detailed level of  resolution.
Meanwhile, the U.S. intelligence community had one of those bland little
schoolroom maps of the country with no detail, and a regional economic study
with severely flawed premises.
_http://www.forbes.com/technology/2006/04/15/intelligence-open-source_cx_rds_0
6slate_0418steeleside.html_
(http://www.forbes.com/technology/2006/04/15/intelligence-open-source_cx_rds_06slate_0418steeleside.html)


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