I'm perplexed and a little angry at the near total big-media blackout about the Hayes story here with a follow-up here. What few items have surfaced have usually been seriously flawed. To be fair, the Sy Hersh story about "stovepipes" for "raw intelligence" (which sounds suspiciously like "raw sewage" doesn't it) was also ignored by major media after its original publication in the NYT. Not that I side with Hersh, but it's the other side of the same story. Jack Shafer has an article in Slate speculating that the reason for spiking the story might be a combination of laziness and complacency about the status quo. Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball were, apparently, tasked with bludgeoning the Hayes story to death in a Newsweek article.
About the only thing in the Newsweek piece that isn't just dripping with panic that the "secular/religious" totalitarian split might not be a valid way to look at the problem, is their contention that the Feith memo:
...mostly recycles shards of old, raw data that were first assembled last year by a tiny team of floating Pentagon analysts (led by a Pennsylvania State University professor and U.S. Navy analyst Christopher Carney) whom Feith asked to find evidence of an Iraqi-Al Qaeda “connection” in order to better justify a U.S. invasion.
But nothing else they say goes very far beyond that assertion, and they tellingly stop short of repeating the canard that proof exists placing Atta in the US at the time of his supposed meeting with an IIS official in Prague in April, 2001. Instead they simply say that the FBI "cannot confirm" the meeting, as though that means something. They manage to avoid mention of the the "erroneous" placement of Atta in the US at the time, because it doesn't fit their primary thesis that the intelligence services ought to be falling all over themselves to verify a connection between Al Qaeda and Saddam. Epstein's story, on the other hand, maintains enough objectivity about the facts to suggest precisely the opposite: that the intelligence services have been engaged in something like a cover up.
But what irks me the most about the Newsweek/Isikoff story is the way they trot out the following bin Laden statement as some sort of "proof" that religious totalitarians don't speak to secular totalitarians:
“The socialists and their rulers [had] lost their legitimacy a long time ago and the socialists are infidels regardless of where they are, whether in Baghdad or in Aden,”
Well, for one thing bin Laden would hardly have felt compelled to back up the legitimacy of Saddam, especially when this secular totalitarian was on the verge of being routed by the Americans. To do so would have tied his legitimacy to theirs, which would have been a rather uncanny thing to do. But more importantly than that rather sophomoric reading of the text is the complete failure to notice statements like the following, an uncomplicated religious justification of wisdom right out of Lawrence of Arabia that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" (emphasis added):
To repel the greatest of the two dangers on the expense of the lesser one is an Islamic principle which should be observed. It was the tradition of the Sunnah (Ahlul Sunnah) to join and invade fight (sic) with the righteous and non righteous men. Allah may support this religion by righteous and non righteous people as told by the prophet (ALLAH'S BLESSING AND SALUTATIONS ON HIM). -- Osama bin Laden in his 1996 Declaration of War Against the Americans
In summary, I really don't think there is one single explanation for why this story is being squashed. Instead, there are probably several reasons that tend to converge, producing the peculiar pattern of events we've seen. They are:
1. Complacency about a comfortable media consensus around an argument that secularism and religiosity don't mix.
2. Old fashioned "liberal bias" that rejects anything that interferes with a wistful longing for the simpler times of the Vietnam era.
3. An unwillingness to get mixed up in battles between the Executive and the intelligence services.
4. The "not invented here" syndrome that rejects a story originating in the Weekly Standard, and talked about extensively in the blogosphere.
5. An organizational dysfunction in the intelligence services by which they cling to outmoded methodologies and hidebound procedures, that I discussed previously here.
Any one theory doesn't quite cut it, but put them all together and we have something. It's a multivariate world, you know.
Posted by Demosophist at November 20, 2003 12:22 PM | TrackBackWhat do you think about the possibility that a fixation on the Paul Pillar "nonstate actors" theory tends to lead CIA analysts, and the reporters who talk to those analysts, to suppress or discount evidence of state involvement in al Queda activities? I was quite struck by this article, especially by the fact that it both contained a lot of the allegations of the Feith memo, and some actual names to put to these usually-unnamed analysts.
Posted by: Mitch H. at November 21, 2003 04:08 PMI haven't read those pieces, but there does seem to be an eagerness to fixate on formulae of various kinds and once that's done to build it into organizational culture. That was certainly the case with the Vietnam-era DoD, which required decades to begin to fix. We can't afford that sort of time now. I'll read those articles, after I wind down a bit.
Posted by: Scott (to Mitch) at November 21, 2003 05:27 PMMitch:
With reference to the New Yorker article:
George Fernandes is the Defense Minister of the Indian Bharatiya Janata Party? George Fernandes?? On the other hand, why not? There are lots of people from Australnesia with Spanish surnames.
The Taliban bookcase with the collected works of Washington Irving was a nice touch.
Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan—who had long emphasized a need to improve intelligence collection and analysis, as well as the oversight of the more than thirty-billion-dollar national intelligence apparatus—said, "The question is: Why don't we learn to read? What's the State Department for? The political leadership in India as much as said they were going to begin testing. There's a tendency at the State Department to say, 'Gee, the C.I.A. never told us.'
Classic Moynihan. I met him once in a DC hotel, and shook hands with him. Glad I did that. It was probably more meaningful for me than shaking hands with JFK would have been.
In the world of intelligence, this is known as mirror-imaging: the projection of American values and behavior onto America's enemies and rivals. "I suppose my bottom line is that both the intelligence and the policy communities had an underlying mind-set going into these tests that the B.J.P. would behave as we behave," Jeremiah said at a press conference held to announce his findings.
I think this kind of error probably also underlies the peace movement, in the sense that they presume the folks we're fighting have values similar to ours. It's both silly, and human nature, to believe that.
"There is a tendency in our planning to confuse the unfamiliar with the improbable. The contingency we have not considered seriously looks strange; what looks strange is thought improbable; what is improbable need not be considered seriously."
This entire source of error could be avoided if we simply presume guilt rather than innocence. It then becomes our objective to search for evidence that refutes the guilt presumption, which would lead us into an ability to appreciate the unfamiliar.
There have been frequent reports of tension between the Defense Department and the C.I.A., particularly on the question of the links between Saddam and Al Qaeda. But the two men who lead these bureaucracies have kind words for each other.
I just want to make clear that I'm not anti-CIA. I think they do an excellent job of implementing the methods they've chosen to use. I simply think some of those methods are no longer appropriate.
Feith brought with him a Defense Intelligence Agency analyst, Tina Shelton, and a Naval intelligence reservist, Christopher Carney. The Defense Department had asked Shelton and Carney to reëxamine evidence collected by the C.I.A. about the relationship between terrorist networks and their state sponsors, including Iraq and Al Qaeda, and to re-analyze the data in the manner suggested by Rumsfeld's ballistic-missile-threat commission; that is, to build a hypothesis, and then see if the data supported the hypothesis, rather than the reverse.
Precisely!
The ambiguity, Gates said, has to do with "intentions," and he went on, "If the stakes and the consequences are small, you're going to want ninety-per-cent assurance. It's a risk calculus. On the other hand, if your worry is along the lines of what Rumsfeld is saying—another major attack on the U.S., possibly with biological or chemical weapons—and you look at the consequences of September 11th, then the equation of risk changes. You have to be prepared to go forward with a lot lower level of confidence in the evidence you have. A fifty-per-cent chance of such an attack happening is so terrible that it changes the calculation of risk."
It seems to me that setting up a relatively independent intelligence operation, as Feith has done, has actually begun to change the culture at the CIA in very healthy ways. That's pretty much what a canny individual would expect. And, of course, it's exactly the opposite of what Sy Hersh contends. He's in a different business: muckraking.
Posted by: Scott (to Mitch) at November 22, 2003 12:55 AMIn this case Fernades is portuguese. People from goya are catolic and of portugese and indian origins. That is probably why the name.
Posted by: joe at November 22, 2003 12:50 PM"This entire source of error could be avoided if we simply presume guilt rather than innocence. It then becomes our objective to search for evidence that refutes the guilt presumption, which would lead us into an ability to appreciate the unfamiliar."
That is a tenet of the Napoleonic code, as you well know, he being a charismatic that you claim not to respect. (read this as a ?????)
Posted by: dayvid at November 27, 2003 03:58 PMThat is a tenet of the Napoleonic code, as you well know, he being a charismatic that you claim not to respect. (read this as a ?????)
I have no idea what you're talking about. The French criminal justice system has a version of 'guilty until proved innocent" but I assume it's a legacy of Roman, or statutory, law. (I could be wrong about that, but it certainly predates Napoleon.) As far as I know the "innocent until proved guilty" paradigm is a legacy of English common law, although there may be other sources. The French system may have been tweaked so that its underlying presumptions are difficult to unravel. Irrespective of all that, you really have two choices and it seems rather irrational to presume innocence when the consequence could be mass murder on the scale of a city population. Seems like just common sense to me. You're saying we should presume innocence? Why???
By the way, the whole point of this is that an "ad hoc" system doesn't cut it. We need to institutionalize and systematize something so that people are treated consistently. It's just that conventionly criminal law is not a good model.
Posted by: Scott (to Dayvid> at November 27, 2003 04:32 PM