Congress Dumbs Down Intelligence

(Weekly Standard)  This column was written by Michael Tanji.

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Secret intelligence work is one of the most important tools a government can use to reduce — in Rumsfeldian parlance — "unknown unknowns." Intelligence is a national security decision-making tool, not a ball to be taken out and kicked about when cheap political points need to be scored. Yet now that the Department of Defense Inspector General's Office has released its report on the intelligence-related activities of the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, that is exactly what is going on.

Leaks of secret intelligence documents are curious affairs. The general public rarely gets to see the full text of intelligence assessments because, as prolific as they can be, leakers gain no benefit from revealing the full picture. Doing so would reveal, as the recent key judgments of the national intelligence estimate on Iraq showed, that there is often a ray of light amongst all the doom and gloom.

Readers of such reports should also keep in mind that the intelligence business is neither magical nor unimpeachable. Collection work — the domain of James Bond in popular culture — is filled with tedious if dangerous drudgery. This goes doubly so for analytic work, which is carried out in mind-numbing, imagination-draining cubicle farms where creativity, ingenuity, and original thoughts are beaten out of the workforce by industrial-age processes and cold-war mindsets.

Readers get a taste of how dysfunctional intelligence work can be when they read declassified assessments, which are derided not only for their language but content. NIEs are supposed to be the best effort of the best minds the intelligence community has on a given topic, but anyone who follows the same issues without benefit of classified information could — and frequently do — produce work of equal or superior quality. This begs the question: why pay any special attention to the findings of so-called experts?

It is exactly that sort of thinking that likely kicked off the competitive intelligence analysis work carried out by the Office of Special Plans. That such an effort would be initiated should have come as no surprise to anyone who remembered that Paul Wolfowitz — Doug Feith's superior at the Pentagon — was a member of "Team B" which, provided an alternative analysis of the Soviet WMD threat. Since the Pentagon is the primary agency charged with fighting and destroying our Islamic enemies, one might say it was a foregone conclusion that those in power in the DOD would seek out differing theories, opinions, and analysis than what was offered from an intellectual collective that has frequently failed to predict or correctly judge significant world events.

The disposition of the Pentagon hierarchy notwithstanding, both pre- and postwar assessments of the intelligence community's performance have justified putting more and more diverse minds against difficult national security problems than can be found behind the walls of government agencies. Every report of U.S. intelligence performance after a so-called intelligence failure points out the importance of considering alternative views and the significance of prominently displaying dissenting opinions in intelligence assessments. This is a proposition agreed upon by every politician who is currently whining about the alleged impropriety of the OSP's actions. Either competition, open minds and original thoughts are good or they are not: you cannot have it both ways.

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[briannorwood]

Hey Mr. Tanji:

In your eloquent dismissal of those of us who have a problem with these gestapo type, war mongering neocons running amok in this administration, there's just one little point you failed to mention...

That is, one of those estimates was correct, while the other was dead wrong.

Can you guess which one was which?

[ademeyer]

I agree with ObservantX, clemenhagen1 and Meritocrat. Its such a relief to read the truth for a change. Thanks for your posts.

[observantx]

Every member of this administration needs to be taken into custody and investigated for the extent to which they set into motion the misguided and unnecessary war in Iraq.

The initiation of the war in Iraq was an act of treason. The lying to Congress and the American people about the necessity and reasons to begin war in Iraq was an act of treason.

The unwarranted spying on American citizens, the unlawful kidnapping, transport into false imprisonment and torture of individuals if not an act of treason, is a gross violation of rights granted by the Constitution of the United States.

In addition, any members of Congress, the intelligence community, business community, lobby groups or political action groups who aided and abetted this administration's gross and treasonous conduct need to be taken into custody and investigated.

It is time to clean house. It is time to rid ourselves of this foul disease of our body politic.

[oleander8]

To: Meritocrat

Thank you, for your remarks. Unfortunately not enough people will read and appreciate them. You should be a guest contributor to a widely read column.

[meritocrat]

Rant V:
Citizens of these United States must be shown how the IC was prostituted to perpetrate this outright fraud which has already cost the lives of more young servicemen and women than were lost on September 11, 2001, not to mention an accrual of one trillion in unsecured debts. At best, this fraud was a zealous, moronic, %u201Cfaith-based%u201D attempt to sew the seeds of liberal democracy within a region and state whose well-known and ancient inter-sectarian and ethnic conflagration doomed it to failure. At worst, this Administration%u2019s motive to launch OIF was an unforgivable, unconscionable, and yet deliberate partisan political act to secure another four years of power. At least in the latter case, it can be seen as a success. Justice seekers take heart; God will doubtlessly offer only a microgram of pity upon their souls.

[meritocrat]

Rant IV:
As one who had an extensive breadth and depth of knowledge of prewar intelligence on Iraq which included compartmented information well above the classification of the NIE, I will vehemently assert until my last breath that the NIE did not represent an objective assessment. It was not written or edited by those most qualified within the US intelligence community; it avoided and undercut them. It was, in fact, a self-serving, reasonless prospective designed to achieve a political sales job. Drafts were personally edited by the Vice President, the Secretary of Defense, and their single-minded henchmen with particular attention paid to massaging the executive summary and the accompanying briefings, beyond which very few Congressmen were compelled or had the means to explore. When Mr. Snow incessantly reminds us all that Congress voted in 2002 to authorize the war, he forgets to mention that it was (and remains) this Administration who provided executive oversight of the entire US IC and directly manipulated it to sell Congress the Iraqi WMD snake oil. Mr. Snow, when conmen defraud little-old ladies of their life savings, do we send them all to jail together?

[meritocrat]

Rant III:
The consolidation of the entire IC under the Director of National Intelligence, a Presidential appointment, only further eroded any objectivity. To give the IC the objectivity it needs, a court of senior analysts must be created that is independent of both the Legislative and Executive Branch, with appointments and terms similar to Supreme Court Justices. These senior analysts could impartially review IC products, and produce independent NIEs. Knowing the IC as I now do, I can tell you until such impartiality is achieved, we cannot, and the world will not, trust any assertion our IC makes, ever again.

[meritocrat]

Rant II:
Why is objectivity so important to intelligence assessments? Intelligence analysis is often like an attempt to duplicate someone%u2019s secret 400-page diary. Rarely do you get access to the actual book, instead you must proceed after meeting the person on the street, seeing the outside of their home, obtaining a glimpse of a paragraph on page 13, sifting through some of their trash and thumbing through a family picture album that represents the last few years of key events. Obviously, much is often up to interpretation and conjecture, leaving lots of room for error %u2013 and/or manipulation. It is, in fact, easier to write a diary that suits a predetermined storyline than it is to approximate the original. This Administration set forth with a predetermined story and diligently cherry-picked and made paramount the tidbits of evidence that met their storyline regardless its ambiguity, dubiety, or continuity with other evidence of much greater quantity or quality. Analysts were conscience of the fraud be also knew that publicly or even privately disagreeing with the Administration%u2019s assertions put their livelihoods and freedom at risk. Thus, this easy manipulability was and is the Achilles%u2019 heel of intelligence.

[meritocrat]

Rant part I:
Mr. Tanji%u2019s column ended where it should have started, %u201C%u2026quality, insightful, and timely intelligence is paramount to our success.%u201D True, but one critical adjective is glaringly (and purposefully) absent, namely, %u201Cobjective.%u201D As an intelligence professional, I can tell you that this element is most essential to whatever use intelligence products may be applied. What this Congress is righteously pursuing is a public airing of the gross manipulation of objective intelligence that the neoconservatives in and formerly of this Administration undertook to ensure national and international support for their %u201Cgrand%u201D plans.

[clemenhagen1]

#1. They cooked the books. The intelligence proved to be flawed because they "fixed the intelligence around the policy" as stated in the Downing Street Memo. Feith and the others had the job of spinning false analysis of fixed intel.

#2. Much of the information they spun came from what should clearly have been seen as unstable sources. Curveball, a drunk exile, found nobody to take his claims serious except the U.S. The same can be said for the convicted fraud, Chalabi. These exiles possessed a clear agenda, told the U.S. what they knew Bush's crew wanted to hear, and now they blame the CIA! How can anyone not be incredulous?

#3. The waged war on any in the intelligence or political community who challenged their fiction. They not only outted Valerie Plame to get back at her husband, they exposed an entire CIA company, Brewster-Jennings. Why? To send a clear message to any in the intelligence community that they would stop at nothing, including treason and putting operatives lives at risk, in order to defend the fraudulence and fabrications that constituted their "slam dunk" case for an illegal war.