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US intelligence under the
microscope
By David Isenberg
It appears that the United State intelligence
community is about to take a refresher course in
Epistemology 101. Epistemology is the branch of
philosophy that deals with the methods of obtaining
knowledge, especially with reference to the limits and
validity of knowledge. And it turns out that various US
spy agencies many not really have had the certainty
about what they thought they knew, insofar as the
proliferation of nuclear biological and chemical weapons
programs, ie, the dreaded weapons of mass destruction
(WMD) which have been the threat du jour in
recent years.
That is the gist of an article in
the November 18 New York Times. It reported that a broad
US government reassessment of intelligence about illicit
weapons programs around the world is prompting a
softening of some earlier judgments about foreign
arsenals.
The reappraisal is being conducted in
two classified reviews by the National Intelligence
Council, which reports to Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA) director George Tenet. When the reviews are
completed, which is expected to occur soon, they will
become formal national intelligence estimates. One of
the reassessments reportedly downgrades the certainty
that China has actually deployed chemical weapons with
its military units.
Despite protestation to the
contrary, the process is obviously at least partially
stimulated by the lack of success in locating actual
biological or chemical weapons in Iraq. And it is about
time. A review of the accuracy and quality of
intelligence reporting is long overdue. Putting aside
issues such as whether the intelligence community was
pressured by the White House to distort its assessments,
the truth is that the US intelligence community has been
struggling for years with regard to its intelligence
analysis.
And this is hardly new. Back in the
Reagan administration, CIA director William Casey
frequently imposed his view on intelligence analyses
regarding the Soviet threat in Central America, Soviet
military power, and the prospects for revolution in
Mexico and the existence - or non-existence - of
"moderates" in the Iranian government.
The way
he asserted his role distorted the assessment process.
While all the elements of the intelligence community
could get their views incorporated in a footnote,
policymakers might never know the extent of disagreement
with the Casey view.
The US intelligence
community collectively employs tens of thousands of
analysts and assets, but it uses technology, not spies
in trench coats, to gather most of the intelligence it
processes. That is a legacy of the Cold War, when the
intelligence community used its satellite and
communications interception capability, technology,
exotic sensors, earth-penetrating radar and other
hi-tech equipment to monitor the former Soviet Union.
But such a high-tech approach is often
inadequate for biological and chemical weapons programs,
which can be constructed from dual-purpose materials and
industries, meaning they have legitimate commercial and
weapons applications.
But aside from limitations
on intelligence collection and analysis aside, one does
not have to look far to find examples of reporting on
supposed WMD proliferation that are just plain wrong.
On November 18, while debating the intelligence
authorization act for fiscal year 2004, Representative
Jane Harman said, "In the course of a five month
investigation, the House Permanent Select Committee on
Intelligence on a bipartisan basis has identified
serious shortcomings in the prewar intelligence on
Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and ties to
terrorism. We found that sketchy and often
circumstantial evidence produced estimates that likely
were substantially wrong. At a minimum, the intelligence
community overstated the strength of the underlying data
supporting its conclusions."
Yet another problem
is the process itself. In September, former Clinton
administration deputy secretary of defense John Hamre
wrote in Aviation Week and Space Technology: "In
relationship to this quest for certainty, I noticed that
fragments of information gained greater certainty the
farther away they were from the intelligence
professional. The intelligence analyst is usually
careful to note the reliability and timeliness of the
intelligence 'fact', but the qualifiers are often
summarized and dropped as the intelligence briefing
moves up the decision-making ladder. Alternative
hypotheses are often omitted. A data element of
questionable reliability can gain credibility as it
rises through the intelligence hierarchy until it
becomes authoritative evidence. "
Or, consider
the 1998 Report of the "Commission to Assess the
Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States" chaired
by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. It concluded that
any nation with a well-developed, Scud-based missile
infrastructure would be able to flight-test an
Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) within about
five years of deciding to do so. It further asserted
that North Korea and Iran were seeking this capability
in order to deliver WMDs. Yet, as the Arms Control
Association in Washington DC, noted this summer, since
the report's release, "none of the emerging missile
states have flight-tested a missile with even half the
range of an ICBM. The report that helped kill the ABM
[Anti-Ballistic Missile] Treaty was spectacularly wrong
about its principal premise."
Another frequent
problem is that intelligence customers, ie,
policymakers, simply ignore facts that don't suit their
preferred conclusions. For example, back in July, the
White House released a portion of the 2002 National
Intelligence Estimate on Iraq that said intelligence
agencies concluded Iraq probably will have a nuclear
weapon within this decade if it pursued a weapons
program unchecked. But the report also included a
footnote, a rarely used means of formal dissent from the
State Department's intelligence agency that referred to
Iraq's attempt to buy uranium tubes. Such efforts are
not clearly linked to a nuclear end use, the footnote
said. It added that the claims of Iraqi pursuit of
natural uranium in Africa are, in the agency's
assessment, highly dubious.
Asked by reporters
at a news conference in July whether the president was
aware of the State Department's dissent from the group,
a senior White House official said that President George
W Bush hadn't read the full 90-page report, adding, "The
president of the United States is not a fact checker."
And, if unpleasant facts get in the way they can
simply be bypassed. An article by veteran investigative
reporter Seymour Hersh in the October 27 New Yorker
provides an example. He cites Kenneth Pollack, a former
National Security Council expert on Iraq who supported
the war, "what the Bush people did was 'dismantle the
existing filtering process that for 50 years had been
preventing the policymakers from getting bad
information. They created stovepipes to get the
information they wanted directly to the top
leadership'."
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times Online
Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for
information on our sales and syndication policies.)
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