The C.I.A.: Method and Madness

After speaking to "innumerable" U.S. intelligence officers, David Kay has concluded that Bush administration officials did not pressure analysts to exaggerate the threats posed by Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. On Capitol Hill, the Senate Intelligence Committee staff has interviewed over 175 analysts and critics and reached the same conclusion.

Leading the C.I.A.'s own internal review, Richard Kerr has apparently also concluded that there is no evidence that political pressures influenced the C.I.A. reports.

For decades, the U.S. intelligence community has propagated the myth that it possesses analytical methods that must be insulated pristinely from the hurly-burly world of politics. The C.I.A. has portrayed itself as, and been treated as, a sort of National Weather Service of global affairs. It has relied on this aura of scientific objectivity for its prestige, and to justify its large budgets, despite a record studded with error.

The C.I.A.'s scientific pretensions were established early on by Sherman Kent. In his 1949 book "Strategic Intelligence for American World Policy," Kent argued that the truth is to be approached through a systematic method, "much like the method of the physical sciences."

This was at a time, just after the war, when economists, urban planners and social engineers believed that human affairs could be understood scientifically, and that the social sciences could come to resemble hard sciences like physics.

If you read C.I.A. literature today, you can still see scientism in full bloom. The tone is cold, formal, depersonalized and laden with jargon. You can sense how the technocratic process has factored out all those insights that may be the product of an individual's intuition and imagination, and emphasized instead the sort of data that can be processed by an organization.

This false scientism was bad enough during the cold war, when the intelligence community failed to anticipate seemingly nonrational events like the Iran-Iraq war or the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. But it is terrible now in the age of terror, because terror is largely nonrational.

What kind of scientific framework can explain the rage for suicide bombings, now sweeping the Middle East? What technocratic mentality can really grasp the sadistic monster who was pulled out of the spider hole a few weeks ago? Under Saddam, Iraqi society seems to have been in a state of advanced decomposition, with drastic consequences for its W.M.D. program. How can corruption and madness be understood by analysts in Langley, who have a tendency to impose a false order on reality?

We're in a heck of a bind. In the age of global terror and W.M.D., we can't wait until threats are right on top of us. And yet, given the errors over Iraqi W.M.D. stockpiles, we're going to find it very difficult to act preventively because we won't be able to have confidence in our information.

The people at the C.I.A. understand the problem: on the C.I.A. Web site, you can find a book called "Psychology of Intelligence Analysis," which details the community's blind spots. But the C.I.A. can't correct itself by being a better version of itself. The methodology is the problem.

When it comes to understanding the world's thugs and menaces, I'd trust the first 40 names in James Carville's P.D.A. faster than I'd trust a conference-load of game theorists or risk-assessment officers. I'd trust politicians, who, whatever their faults, have finely tuned antennae for the flow of events. I'd trust Mafia bosses, studio heads and anybody who has read a Dostoyevsky novel during the past five years.

Most of all, I'd trust individuals over organizations. Individuals can use intuition, experience and a feel for the landscape of reality. When you read an individual's essay, you know you're reading one person's best guess, not a falsely authoritative scientific finding.

So when the president names the members of intelligence review commission, I hope he won't just select people who are products of the old methodology. I hope he'll pick people who will fundamentally rethink intelligence. And I hope he'll throw in a few political hacks, just for a little reality.

The coming Democrat Legacy
Marty 60

Posted on 02/02/2004 10:38:48 AM CST by marty60

INTELLIGENCE FAILURE- THE REAL DEMOCRAT LEGACY

The Church Commission, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton resulted it twenty-five years of intelligence mediocrity and ineptitude. We now are in the process of allowing yet another round of attacks on a Republican President trying to protect the United States and it's citizens.

Sadly, the American people may well fall for the same simpleminded logic of retail politics, without consideration of the unintended consequences. The War on Terror actually began with the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center. But as with all things Democrat, politics took priority. The decision to launch a full out attack on the American people(right-wing conspiracy) left the true terror network free to plan and implement numerous murderous attacks on Americans. Even the attack on the Cole killing American sailors was not deemed serious enough to divert the intelligence community to the real source of danger to the United States, AL-Qaida.

The goal of the Left and by definition Democrats of rendering the CIA, FBI and other agencies into elitists think tanks has in large measure been achieved. Where was the intelligence on the massive bribes paid by Hussein to various countries and companies? Where was the intelligence that Saudi Arabia is at the heart of Al-qaida funding? Did the Jimmy Carter legacy give us the CIA policy of sending an analyst husband to chitchat with the heads of suspect countries? We probably should have just sent a tourist and saved an exorbitant consulting fee.

Would some well placed money and low level covert operative found out from the Iraqi "scientist" that money talks in the world of terrorists. Would the twenty-five million spent for Saddams head, been better spent bribing some French or other European friend of Saddam about the true nature of the regime?

Yes these are questions that will probably never be answered with the bureaucratic nightmare our Intelligence community has degenerated into. But the fact that these terrorists were allowed to work openly, without fear of retribution is the most damning of all indictments of our agencies.

When President Bush drove the Taliban and Al-Qaida from the public hold on Afghanistan, the CIA should have known that they would look for a new base of operation. To believe that Iran would give them little more than aid and comfort is simpleminded gibberish. To believe that the terror network did not know of Saddams impending doom, if not from one of his sons, than possibly one of his vicious cabinet members is naive. The cast of characters ready to step into the chaos and immediately take control of large segments of the populace in Iraq leads to the conclusion that those plans were already in place. Where else to develop a new base of operations than Iraq. Total access to the Palestinian terrorists. Israel in striking distance. A country with chemical, biological, and nuclear sophistication. All the elements a world wide Jihadists like Bin-Laden and his fellow travelers want. President Bush has stopped this with the dedication and sacrifice of our young men and women in the military. To keep us safe, our military is face to face with the enemy in Iraq.

The new Democrat legacy is in the works. The terrorist just need to wait less than a year. Help defeat George W. Bush. Then Iraq becomes the new Afghanistan. Not only will they not have to sit in cold dank caves, but they ill have oil, and infrastucture at their disposal. why hijack a plane, Iraqi airlines will do. Kuwait will be easy pickings with the proven lack of will on the part of Democrats to stop them. Israel will not deal with homicide bombers, the missiles will do the job. Will the Democrats return to their coddling of the PLO, Hamas, Hezbolla ? I believe the answer is yes. what will the American People have to look forward to with a Democrat in power. More death and destruction? I believe the answer to that question is an unequivocal YES.

There are analytical tools that social scientists and analysts (not just intel. analysts) use to help them think about problems in different ways. The point of this is to overcome biases that are particular to the analyst or common to people. Many of these tools involve rankings, relative weights or other things that reduce ambiguous concepts into concrete looking numbers. Analysts than can perform mathematical functions to analyze their data. There is a school of social scientists who are called behavioralists who believe that you can take these numbers and arrive at scientific conclusion that are as good a those a chemist or physicist might come to. Analyst should be taught that this level of certainty may or may not exist when dealing with theoreticals, but does not exist when dealing with specific cases. The best an analyst can come up with it the most likely answer or the best answer, not the absolute answer. To be clear, I am not an intelligence analyst and don't pretend to be one, but the analytical tools they use are probably generally the same as the ones other analysts are taught.

I would REALLY like to see a line-by-line refutation by The Times on the items detailed by Colin Powell in his presentation before the UN Security Council as detailed here:

Secretary Colin L. Powell
New York City
February 5, 2003
...
Last November 8, this Council passed Resolution 1441 by a unanimous vote. The purpose of that resolution was to disarm Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction. Iraq had already been found guilty of material breach of its obligations stretching back over 16 previous resolutions and 12 years.
Resolution 1441 was not dealing with an innocent party, but a regime this Council has repeatedly convicted over the years.
Resolution 1441 gave Iraq one last chance, one last chance to come into compliance or to face serious consequences. No Council member present and voting on that day had any illusions about the nature and intent of the resolution or what serious consequences meant if Iraq did not comply.
...
The material I will present to you comes from a variety of sources.
Some are U.S. sources and some are those of other countries.
Some are the sources are technical, such as intercepted telephone conversations and photos taken by satellites.
Other sources are people who have risked their lives to let the world know what Saddam Hussein is really up to.

Excerpt - electronic intercepts:

Let me begin by playing a tape for you. What you're about to hear is a conversation that my government monitored. It takes place on November 26th of last year, on the day before United Nations teams resumed inspections in Iraq. The conversation involves two senior officers, a colonel and a brigadier general from Iraq's elite military unit, the Republican Guard.
[The tape is played.] AUDIO
SECRETARY POWELL: Let me pause and review some of the key elements of this conversation that you just heard between these two officers.
First, they acknowledge that our colleague, Mohammed ElBaradei is coming, and they know what he's coming for and they know he's coming the next day. He's coming to look for things that are prohibited. He is expecting these gentlemen to cooperate with him and not hide things.
But they're worried. We have this modified vehicle. What do we say if one of them sees it? What is their concern? Their concern is that it's something they should not have, something that should not be seen.
The general was incredulous: "You didn't get it modified. You don't have one of those, do you?"
"I have one."
"Which? From where?"
"From the workshop. From the Al-Kindi Company."
"What?"
"I'll come to see you in the morning. I'm worried you all have something left."
"We evacuated everything. We don't have anything left."
Note what he says: "We evacuated everything." We didn't destroy it. We didn't line it up for inspection. We didn't turn it into the inspectors. We evacuated it to make sure it was not around when the inspectors showed up. "I will come to you tomorrow."
The Al-Kindi Company. This is a company that is well known to have been involved in prohibited weapons systems activity.

www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2003/17300.htm

I would like the bunkers explained, the 122 mm rockets capable of containing deliverable 'toxins' explained, and the purchases made by Iraq over the past 12 years explained ...

I really don't want to hear one more word about "WMD were not found".

Let's answer a few other basic questions first.

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