That plus the fact that Senator Torricelli cut our intelligence capabilities. Negroponte probably had no choice but to ask for help from people like Jveritas to help translate with the Docex Project.
Posted on 02/19/2007 7:51:52 PM PST by april15Bendovr
Abusing Intelligence
Michael TanjiMon Feb 19, 11:57 AM ET
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.
There is really only one source of first-hand information on what was and was not going on in Iraq prior to the war: the captured document collection held by Pentagon and Army intelligence. The government has admitted that it cannot fully and effectively analyze all the information it had gathered from Iraq--including reports that supported connections between Iraq and terrorists--and in fact they have stopped trying. Former Director of National Intelligence Negroponte begrudgingly released portions of the archive online for public review and analysis, but the most contrived excuse in the world--that an inadvertent disclosure about Iraq's retarded nuclear weapons program helped advance the progress of an active program in Iran--shut down the public effort this past fall. If politicians are truly concerned about finding out who called it right on Iraq, the focus of their angst should be aimed squarely at current-DNI McConnell, not ex-Undersecretary Feith.
The politicization of intelligence does not stop with the Senate. This past week the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence voted unanimously to provide access to the classified NIE on Iraq to the entire House membership. By abdicating the role they play on behalf of the rest of the House, every member of the committee has declared open season on the professionals who conduct intelligence operations and their work. The bickering over intelligence issues was almost unbearable when just a handful of representatives had access to classified material; one can only imagine the cacophony that will erupt once over 400 partisans begin clamoring for their chance to score a goal in front of their myopic fans.
In one sense, politicians can almost be forgiven for abusing intelligence in this fashion because there is nothing that they touch that is not used in some way to gain an advantage over their adversaries across the aisle. What is even more offensive is that the media that covers intelligence issues makes such a concerted effort to facilitate the politicization of intelligence and undermine the work of their mirror images in the classified world.
Intelligence officers and reporters are both charged with seeking out and communicating meaningful information to a set of consumers. Both strive to tell an accurate story based on the most trustworthy information available. How then to explain that the early reports about the Office of Special Plans turned out not to contain the actual findings of the report, but the politically-charged assertions of politicians? Is this the media promulgating partisan spin, or is it merely the result of amateur-level carelessness from veteran national security beat reporters?
Every media report has focused on the "inappropriate" nature of the work that OSP had done and minimized the key fact that there was nothing illegal about the effort. That the work was inappropriate is a mater of opinion offered from criminal investigators, not intelligence professionals; that the work was wrong is an equally flawed assertion that flies in the face of what we have discovered since overthrowing Saddam. I am not one that clamors for more feel-good stories in the media, just one that asks for a modicum of diligence and fairness in the stories that are reported, particularly those that deal with issues of national security.
In this and all future conflicts, quality, insightful, and timely intelligence is paramount to our success. In past conflicts intelligence was a lesser partner to operations given that it used to be fairly easy to observe and target enemy forces for destruction. Today there is not a spot on the planet we cannot destroy; the challenge is figuring out which spot to target. The continued abuse of intelligence for partisan political purposes might make it easier to win re-election, but it makes our ability to fight and win wars drastically more difficult.
Michael Tanji is a former senior intelligence officer and an associate of the Terrorism Research Center. He opines on intelligence and security issues at Haft of the Spear.
"and in fact they have stopped trying" Why?
Please provide a working link for this.
prewardocs ping
ping
Interesting chat.
I found a copy here:
https://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/013/290fenpf.asp
Abusing Intelligence
Difficult though it may be, we need to de-politicize intelligence.
by Michael Tanji
02/16/2007 12:00:00 AM
Thanks for helping find the link, Calpernia.
Yeah, that whole issue was ridiculous...the MSM wanted us to believe that:
A. Pre-war Iraq was not a threat
B. Pre-war Iraq was in possession of dangerous information concerning nuclear weapons technology that could make other states a threat if they were to obtain that information.
The yellow lib press wants to have it both ways.
MI ping
CYA is the main work product of the intellegence agencies.
:)
Thank you for your help while I was absent minded on the URL
Of course Nancy Pelosi in Iraq questioning some poor young female SPC 96B on the misuse of pre-war intell was one of the stupidest things I've ever seen....
That plus the fact that Senator Torricelli cut our intelligence capabilities. Negroponte probably had no choice but to ask for help from people like Jveritas to help translate with the Docex Project.
Its like Mark Twain has stated
"A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes."
If Iran thought anything would have been beneficial for their nuclear program from this 1996 FFCD they would have many years to get it from one way or another from the corrupted UN and IAEA.
The Iranian would have waited for the US to publish it in September 2006 where at this point of time Iran nuclear program was already more advanced than anything the Iraqi nuclear program was and there was absolutely nothing that Iran would have benefited from the Iraqi FFCD document published in September 2006 on the FMSO website.
Exactly.
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