information...indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks” (CIA, 2001, para. 10); “a call to [the US] Embassy in the UAE in May [said] that a group of Bin Ladin supporters was in the US planning attacks with explosives” (CIA, 2001, para. 11). The PDB described Bin Laden’s previous activities. It did not present the President with a critically important clear estimate of Bin Laden’s likely activities in the coming months: Bush had specifically asked for an intelligence analysis of possible al Qaeda attacks within the United States, because most of the information presented to him over the summer about al Qaeda focused on threats against U.S. targets overseas, sources said. But one source said the White House was disappointed because the analysis lacked focus and did not present fresh intelligence. The lack of appropriate WEPs would lead to confusion about the likelihood of an attack and to guessing about the period in which it was likely to occur. The language used in the memo lacks words of estimative probability that reduce uncertainty, thus preventing the President and his decisionmakers from implementing measures directed at stopping al Qaeda’s actions The consequences of the 9/11 and the Iraq/WMD intelligence failures, the 9/11 Commission and the Iraq Intelligence Commission, were the movers of structural reform of the Intelligence Community. Although these reforms intended to improve the functioning of the IC, particularly concerning inter-agency cooperation and information sharing, they paid scant attention to improving the quality of analyses and intelligence writing. There is a pervasive feeling that this improvement is needed. However, there seems to be resistance in the IC, due in part to habit and in part to the reality of politics and the understandable preference for the ‘plausible deniability’ that less precise jargon offers. Medicine Physicians and clinical scientists face a very similar problem in obtaining informed consent for patients, where words such as "rare" or "infrequent" do have actual probabilities defined. Numerical information of this type, however, is rarely presented to patients. A representative guide for obtaining informed consent from people participating in social science or behavioural research, or of the potential risks of a medical procedure, suggests giving typical numerical chances of an adverse event when words of estimative probability first are used. The guideline continues, For studies involving investigational agents, or experimental doses or combinations of drugs and/or