Demosophia

Seymour Hersh: Up the Stovepipe

A friend of mine from the Great White North, who thinks of Michael Moore as no less despicable than this guy, recently wrote me a note concerning Seymour Hersh's New Yorker article "The Stovepipe:"

If they really did dismantle the conventional intelligence screening mechanisms and left themselves open to such misinformation as the Nigerian yellow cake lead now appears, and then, to make matters worse, they embellished the implications of THAT with their escalating warnings about Iraq's nuclear weapons threat, they've lost me entirely. Sure, they did it all sincerely (at least up to the lies part but even that might have been quasi-sincere, if there is such a thing). They weren't trying to line their pockets in gold like some of their stupid critics argue. But still, their hubris allowed them to mislead themselves and the nation.

Anyone who reads Hersh's article would probably reach a similar conclusion, if he were inclined to be indulgent toward the stories spun by the most prominent muckraker in journalism. At the very least it looks like the Bush Administration may have been swallowing radioactive information as if it were orange juice. At worst, they were deliberately lying. However, there are certain elements of the Hersh narrative that demand closer inspection, and if examined carefully would lead one to concerns that eclipse those Hersh raises. In order to make the context of Hersh's narrative more discernable we need to look first at how he chooses to end his article, referring to testimony provided by one Jafar Dhia Jafar, who is described as "a British-educated physicist who coordinated Iraq’s efforts to make the bomb in the nineteen-eighties, and who had direct access to Saddam Hussein." He quotes from the CIA's notes of the interview with Jafar, interspersed with commentary:

The [CIA's] notes said:

Jafar insisted that there was not only no bomb, but no W.M.D., period. “The answer was none.” . . . Jafar explained that the Iraqi leadership had set up a new committee after the 91 Gulf war, and after the unscom [United Nations] inspection process was set up. . . and the following instructions [were sent] from the Top Man [Saddam]—“give them everything.”

The notes said that Jafar was then asked, “But this doesn’t mean all W.M.D.? How can you be certain?” His answer was clear: “I know all the scientists involved, and they chat. There is no W.M.D.” Jafar explained why Saddam had decided to give up his valued weapons:

Up until the 91 Gulf war, our adversaries were regional. . . . But after the war, when it was clear that we were up against the United States, Saddam understood that these weapons were redundant. “No way we could escape the United States.” Therefore, the W.M.D. warheads did Iraq little strategic good.

According to Hersh, Jafar then explained the six-thousand-warhead discrepancy between the weapons manufactured before 1991 and those that were accounted for by the U.N. which, says Hersh "led Western intelligence officials and military planners to make the worst-case assumptions." (Assuming that worst-case assumptions weren't already justified.)

Jafar told his interrogators that the Iraqi government had simply lied to the United Nations about the number of chemical weapons used against Iran during the brutal Iran-Iraq war in the nineteen-eighties. Iraq, he said, dropped thousands more warheads on the Iranians than it acknowledged. For that reason, Saddam preferred not to account for the weapons at all.

Apparently not even under threat of imminent attack by the US. Even if true this is still hardly a position that anyone in their right mind would have endorsed without a great deal more information. The fact that the Bush Administration may have demanded more after hearing stuff like this hardly seems implausible, does it? The first indication that Dr. Jafar might be less than credible would probably have been his glowingly confident assessment of the omniscience-enhancing value of chat within a totalitarian system. Is Hersh really suggesting that we swallow this story without further verification? Moreover, doesn't it seem likely that if the dictator would go to such lengths to lie about the number of weapons used in a past engagement, he might adopt a similar strategy about his future intentions?

However, I want to make clear that it is the sort of thing one might be very interested in, if the attempt were to falsify an assumption of guilt. Under those circumstances it hardly seems surprising that they'd ask for verification. The point is that the information isn't being used to verify an assumption of innocence, but to reject an assumption of guilt... and by itself it's vastly inadequate for that. Far from casting doubt on what the Administration was doing, this testimony together with that of Ken Pollack, below, suggests that they (the Administration) may have simply gone in a direction that the CIA didn't expect or understand.

Apart from that important digression the point here as that Hersh's ultimate frame of reference is a method. It is what I've called elsewhere the "standard method" or the "alpha method" that presumes innocence. But in Hersh's case he then wouldn't even bother to look for evidence to the contrary, because all he requires is a bit of verification of his pet theory. While he does counsel caution about believing Jafar, he doesn't appear to take that advice very seriously, and spends most of his time looking for reasons to believe Saddam. And let me be very clear here. If you assume innocence your objective is to falsify that assumption, not support it. Similarly, if you assume guilt your objective is to challenge that assumption.

Now, with this insight into Hersh's assumptions, lets return to the stovepipe narrative. The first evidence he cites is pretty convincing:

Kenneth Pollack, a former National Security Council expert on Iraq, whose book “The Threatening Storm” generally supported the use of force to remove Saddam Hussein, told me that what the Bush people did was “dismantle the existing filtering process that for fifty years had been preventing the policymakers from getting bad information. They created stovepipes to get the information they wanted directly to the top leadership. Their position is that the professional bureaucracy is deliberately and maliciously keeping information from them.

“They always had information to back up their public claims, but it was often very bad information,” Pollack continued. “They were forcing the intelligence community to defend its good information and good analysis so aggressively that the intelligence analysts didn’t have the time or the energy to go after the bad information.”

Pollack is an exceptionally credible critic primarily because he has consistently favored regime change in Iraq, even if it meant an invasion. So if Hersh is reporting this conversation correctly, it has to be taken seriously. But there are three possible interpretations of Pollack's statement about forcing the intelligence community to defend its "good" information and analysis. The first is that the Administration wanted to discredit information and analysis that it disliked or that didn't fit its own theory. This is obviously the interpretation that Hersh favors. But given Pollack's well-known sentiments it seems unlikely that he would blithely use the term "good information" to refer to anything he knows supports the notion that Saddam was harmless or containable, or that suggested an invasion was unnecessary. Another, more plausible possibility is that they simply mistrusted everything that the CIA had given its Good Housekeeping Seal. This is reasonable given that the CIA had failed to predict an attack on downtown Manhattan that killed around 3,000 people. But a third possibility, that hasn't been raised by anyone, is that people in the Administration might have been probing the vetting process itself. Pressing for verification of what the CIA accepts as good is one way to test their objectivity, for one thing. But more importantly, it may be the best means available to the Administration of testing or challenging information that has the potential to falsify their hypothesis about Saddam, that he was a growing threat.

But Hersh implicitly accepts the first interpretation without question and builds on this case by referring to a conversation with Greg Thielmann, "an expert on disarmament with the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, or INR, [who] was assigned to be the daily intelligence liaison to John Bolton, the Under-Secretary of State for Arms Control," and who is described by Hersh as "a prominent conservative:"

The whole point of the intelligence system in place, according to Thielmann, was “to prevent raw intelligence from getting to people who would be misled.” Bolton, however, wanted his aides to receive and assign intelligence analyses and assessments using the raw data.

And thus the prominent conservative neophyte risks being misled, by pressing a conflict with the expert intelligence officer, and lamely offers as his excuse:

I found that there was lots of stuff that I wasn’t getting and that the INR analysts weren’t including,” he told me. “I didn’t want it filtered. I wanted to see everything—to be fully informed. If that puts someone’s nose out of joint, sorry about that.”

Rumsfeld, another prominent conservative babe-in-the-woods, adopts a similar approach, setting up a separate intelligence unit in the Pentagon under William Luti. So, neither trusted the CIA to avoid inappropriately dismissing some potentially valid intelligence. But just as importantly, they may have had valid concerns about the CIA's methods of vetting what they considered to be good or reliable intelligence too.

Look at it this way: If your use of the information provided by Jafar is simply to strengthen an assumption that Saddam doesn't pose a threat, the sort of assumption you'd adopt in a conventional court case, then the entire case simply doesn't rest on that single piece of intelligence. It plays only a subordinate role. On the other hand, if your use of Jafar's testimony is to smash an assumption that Saddam does pose a threat, and you can verify that it holds up, you can declare your assumption falsified and can accept your alternate hypothesis, that the accused is innocent after all. In this case the information is no longer playing a subordinate, but a primary role. It therefore requires a far more rigorous test. The fact that Jafar may have said something really provacative, and worthy of being used to wrap up his article, may be interesting to Hersh and his readers, but that misses the point.

And here, I think is the core of the problem: If the CIA was an organization in which an alpha decision method had become the norm, or was somehow misapplying the method it had adopted, it isn't unreasonable for an organization that had adopted the alternative method (which was, by the way, appropriate) to insist on unfiltered information. The issue is one that Hersh never addresses, because he never sees it. He never defends, but assumes, that the CIA's methods and procedures were appropriate. Given that those methods and procedures had failed to warn of 9-11, the effort to obtain unfiltered information doesn't seem entirely unreasonable. My point here is that Hersh's bias in favor of an alpha method results in an incomplete and somewhat distorted analysis of the situation. He simply assumes, in other words, that the mistrust of the intel channels was dysfunctional. That may not have been the case at all.

The following item from the Hersh article suggests precisely this assessment of the CIA had been made, throughout the Bush Administration:

The C.I.A. assessment reflected both deep divisions within the agency and the position of its director, George Tenet, which was far from secure. (The agency had been sharply criticized, after all, for failing to provide any effective warning of the September 11th attacks.) In the view of many C.I.A. analysts and operatives, the director was too eager to endear himself to the Administration hawks and improve his standing with the President and the Vice-President. Senior C.I.A. analysts dealing with Iraq were constantly being urged by the Vice-President’s office to provide worst-case assessments on Iraqi weapons issues.

But if we assume that the Bush Administration had already accepted the "worst case" as their working hypothesis, then it stands to reason that they would want to know the possible implications, and would insist on unfiltered info... for the simple reason that they weren't using the same kind of filters employed by the CIA, and had effectively abandoned that method. It is extremely unlikely that any such evidence would ever make it up through the CIA's filtering channels, because they simply weren't looking for it. That also suggests a reason why they might have forced the CIA to defend the information it thought was "good" as a way of vetting the vetting process. Another option might have been to completely reorganize the CIA, and impose a different set of methods from the top down, but since it appears that senior CIA analysts had already taken a position against such an approach (not in so many words, but operationally by looking for reasons to doubt Saddam), people in the Administration may simply have decided that such a re-organization would have taken too much time, and created too much disruption.

Hersh then spends the next few paragraphs discussing Joseph Wilson's "excellent credentials" and the circumstances of his mission to Niger, concluding that:

He learned that any memorandum of understanding to sell yellowcake would have required the signatures of Niger’s Prime Minister, Foreign Minister, and Minister of Mines. “I saw everybody out there,” Wilson said, and no one had signed such a document. “If a document purporting to be about the sale contained those signatures, it would not be authentic.” Wilson also learned that there was no uranium available to sell: it had all been pre-sold to Niger’s Japanese and European consortium partners.

So Hersh's version of "vetting" information is to assume that officials in Niger have all spoken honestly to an American diplomat about a sale that would surely have put them on the wrong side of an Administration from which they wished to obtain financial aid? Is it any wonder that "top officials" in the Bush Administration might not want their information run through such filters?

And again, what sort of unencumbered facts are we given in the Hersh article?

By early March, 2002, a former White House official told me, it was understood by many in the White House that the President had decided, in his own mind, to go to war.

Here we have a subjective opinion expressed by an anonymous source... and we're supposed to take this as an empirical fact? Moreover, not only is this piece of information accepted as fact, but it's used to explain the re-allocation of resources to the Persian Gulf. It's a neat trick, because it certainly wouldn't be possible to do the reverse, and substantiate the opinion expressed above by reference to the tired old claim of the anti-Bush post-moderns that Bush was pulling too many resources from the War on Terrorism and reassigning them to Iraq. What we have here is two assumptions appearing to reinforce one another, simply because they happen to fit a by-now-familiar narrative. Neither is a fact. Philosophers call this "the hermeneutic circle."

So, we're still waiting for some facts. And instead, we're provided with yet another familiar narrative of the left, about the defector reports provided by Chalabi's INC. And, again, there's a presumption that such "garbage" should not be seen by the Administration because they'd be, somehow, unduly influenced.

There isn't much doubt that this situation is dysfunctional, but how, and who's fault is it? And more importantly how would one go about fixing it? The following sentiment, expressed by another "X" sums it up:

“It became a personality issue,” a Pentagon consultant said of the Bush Administration’s handling of intelligence. “My fact is better than your fact. The whole thing is a failure of process. Nobody goes to primary sources.” The intelligence community was in full retreat.

After establishing that something was wrong, but by no means having clarified what it was, Hersh discusses the sequence of events surrounding the documents that supported the Administration's earlier contentions about the sale of nuclear material from Africa. In doing so he introduces an extraordinary conspiracy theory that ought to have eclipsed the concerns about "stovepipes," yellow cake, and everything else.

In late summer [August 7th through September 14th,, 2002], the White House sharply escalated the nuclear rhetoric. There were at least two immediate targets: the midterm congressional elections and the pending vote on a congressional resolution authorizing the President to take any action he deemed necessary in Iraq, to protect America’s national security.

On August 7th, Vice-President Cheney, speaking in California, said of Saddam Hussein, “What we know now, from various sources, is that he . . . continues to pursue a nuclear weapon.” On August 26th, Cheney suggested that Saddam had a nuclear capability that could directly threaten “anyone he chooses, in his own region or beyond.” He added that the Iraqis were continuing “to pursue the nuclear program they began so many years ago.”

This sort of thing goes on for awhile, until early October.

At that moment, in early October, 2002, a set of documents suddenly appeared that promised to provide solid evidence that Iraq was attempting to reconstitute its nuclear program. The first notice of the documents’ existence came when Elisabetta Burba, a reporter for Panorama,

He goes on to describe how Burba scoped out the story in mid October, and debunked the Niger documents, which may or may not have been the same as the SISMI documents that Cheney had been referring to earlier. This was 8 months after Wilson's mission to Nigeria. The documents were, however, given to the American Embassy in Italy and then made their way to DC. At this point he is using sources that he says are "two former C.I.A. officials [who] provided slightly different accounts." One account was this:

Once the documents were in Washington, they were forwarded by the C.I.A. to the Pentagon, he said. “Everybody knew at every step of the way that they were false—until they got to the Pentagon, where they were believed.”

And the other was this:

The second former official, Vincent Cannistraro, who served as chief of counter-terrorism operations and analysis, told me that copies of the Burba documents were given to the American Embassy, which passed them on to the C.I.A.’s chief of station in Rome, who forwarded them to Washington. Months later, he said, he telephoned a contact at C.I.A. headquarters and was told that “the jury was still out on this”—that is, on the authenticity of the documents.

Yeah I guess those were slightly different accounts, alright! One had "metaphysical certitude" that the documents were frauds, and the other had "methodological uncertainty" about their validity. The moon is slightly different from the sun. Which would you believe? Hersh clearly believes the first, just as he really believes in Jafar's informative chats with his totalitarian buddies.

Now this is where it gets really interesting. Although it sure seems like the Administration jumped to a conclusion that Iraq was buying uranium, the question that keeps coming up is where did these documents come from? Apparently they came from a group of disgruntled former CIA officers out to "put the bite" on Cheney, and other officials in the White House who, in their opinion "were not practicing good tradecraft and vetting intelligence." So it comes full circle. We now know that there were two branches of government, one elected and the other appointed and supposedly serving at their pleasure, that had a deep methodological split amounting to something like conflicting worldviews. And the CIA people were so certain of their assumption that any other approach simply amounted to malfeasance. Furthermore, this malfeasance was so egregious that it justified the deliberate deception of an elected Chief Executive and Commander in Chief. And to think, the White House had doubts about trusting these guys to filter their information! What got into them!

But how does Hersh spin this extraordinary story?

“What’s telling,” he [an unnamed "retired clandestine officer"] added, “is that the story, whether it’s true or not, is believed”—an extraordinary commentary on the level of mistrust, bitterness, and demoralization within the C.I.A. under the Bush Administration.

Isn't the traitorous glee with which this story is circulated within the CIA some sort of commentary on precisely how the distrust by the Administration of the CIA might have come about? And according to the same individual, his colleagues reacted to the President's use of the Niger information by exclaiming: ‘Holy shit, all of a sudden the President is talking about it in the State of the Union address!’ At that point, falling back on their spook training, they decided to build a backfire, by leaking the documents to the I.A.E.A. to be debunked without implicating themselves.

So, if we look at the evidence alone, without the distorted context provided by Hersh's interpretations and his implicit assumption that the CIA's methods were nearly infallible, as well as his "Monday morning quarterbacking," what emerges is the image of a CIA and Intelligence Community that no one in their right mind would trust, and an Administration that attempted to get around this glaring problem by setting up an ad hoc intelligence process with a completely different objective: to test a competing hypothesis. They weren't focused on "proving guilt" because they had assumed it. They were focused appropriately on the very core of the case, and placed information relevant to undermining their assumption at the pinnacle of their method. And it would seem that for anyone not primarily interested in muckraking, the lead story here would have been that the CIA may have deliberately misled the President in a way that actually made war more likely. Have I missed something?

Posted by Demosophist at October 30, 2003 03:02 PM | TrackBack