The left is imposing an evidentiary burden on Powell tantamount to the strict burden of proof required in a court of law. Goldberg has an excellent piece in the New Yorker setting forth why such a burden of proof is insane when one considers the actions of terrorists and angelic beings like Saddam. It is posted at FADG, and I'm posting the links to it here.
C2@pearlsbeforeswine.com
newyorker.com
THE UNKNOWN
by JEFFREY GOLDBERG
The C.I.A. and the Pentagon take another look at Al Qaeda and Iraq.
Issue of 2003-02-10
Posted 2003-02-03
In April of 1998, President Clinton sent his United Nations Ambassador, Bill Richardson, to South Asia. Richardson's stops included New Delhi, Islamabad, and, most unusually, Kabul, where he held the first (and, as it turned out, the last) Cabinet-level negotiations between the United States and the Taliban leaders of Afghanistan. Richardson, who is now the governor of New Mexico, is an effective diplomat. (He returned to international diplomacy briefly last month, when he met with two North Korean envoys in Santa Fe.) He is irreverent, and he is not timid, and his trip might have been a diplomatic success if it had not been an intelligence failure.
During the stop in New Delhi, Richardson met with officials of the new Hindu-nationalist government of the Bharatiya Janata Party. In one encounter, Richardson asked the defense minister, George Fernandes, if his country planned to explode any of its nuclear weapons. The Indians had not tested their bomb since 1974, but in early 1998 the newspapers in New Delhi—and in Islamabad, the Pakistani capital—were filled with speculation about the new government's intentions. The B.J.P. had stated in its election platform that it would "not be dictated to by anybody in matters of security and in the exercise of the nuclear option."
Fernandes, a self-described pacifist, told Richardson that India had no intention of exploding a nuclear device. Then he changed the subject to the situation in Burma. In other meetings, Richardson was given the same soothing message, and the mission to India was so relaxed that the Assistant Secretary of State, Karl Inderfurth, who was managing the trip, spent part of one day trying to set up a cricket demonstration for Richardson, a former minor-league baseball player. The demonstration was interrupted only once, so that Richardson could receive a six-minute intelligence briefing from a New Delhi-based C.I.A. officer.
I accompanied Richardson on the trip, and he allowed me to follow him into many of his meetings, except for C.I.A. briefings. But it is clear that no one from the C.I.A. told Richardson that the Indians were about to explode five nuclear devices in the Rajasthan desert, which is what they did less than a month after the delegation left South Asia. Not long ago, one of Richardson's former top aides, Calvin Mitchell, told me, "Even after we returned from the region, we received no intelligence that the Indians had lied to us."
Richardson was equally ill-informed in Afghanistan. In a single day, we visited Kabul and Sheberghan, a town in the north held by anti-Taliban rebels, and flew back to Islamabad at sundown. It was a strange day; at one stop, a senior National Security Council official fell into a sewage ditch, and the NBC correspondent Andrea Mitchell was nearly trampled by a posse of Uzbek horsemen. Nothing was stranger, however, than the meeting with the Taliban.
"We have a whole range of issues we're going to bring up with the Taliban leadership," Inderfurth had told me the day before the trip. Osama bin Laden, the Taliban's most famous guest, "is just one," he said.
The American delegation was met at the Kabul airport by Taliban gunmen in pickup trucks, who drove us to the Presidential Palace. The freewheeling Richardson decided to include me in the delegation, telling me to identify myself as a "note-taker," should anyone ask. An honor guard of Pashtun fighters greeted us and led us through a series of musty corridors to a small room with gray walls. The room was undecorated, except for a bookcase holding the collected works of Washington Irving. We had a long wait before the Taliban delegation arrived. It was led by Mohammed Rabbani, the deputy to Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader (who rarely left Kandahar, and who in any case refused to meet non-Muslims). The Taliban men were ignorant of diplomatic niceties, and Richardson's icebreaking small talk was met by incomprehension. But Richardson gamely moved through the issues. He expressed the Clinton Administration's concern that the Taliban was shielding a terrorist. Rabbani, who sweated profusely throughout the meeting, responded, "He is our guest here. He is under our control."
Richardson persisted; so did the Taliban. Richardson consulted his State Department and N.S.C. advisers; we waited to see how far he would push the matter. He dropped it, and continued with the agenda, which included a discussion of the possibility of running an oil pipeline across parts of Taliban territory. We were then led to a banquet hall, where we were served rice and pigeon as gunmen circled the table.
Calvin Mitchell said, "We certainly didn't know much about Osama at the time. We didn't know the extent of his network or that he was bankrolling the entire Taliban."
When I reached Richardson recently at the governor's mansion in Santa Fe, he recalled his post-mission frustration. "When a foreign leader wants to deceive you, even the best intelligence is not going to prove in a foolproof way that the leader is deceiving you," he said. "But we need to have a better way of sensing the deception of foreign leaders."
Shortly after the failure to predict India's nuclear tests, George Tenet, the C.I.A. director, asked a retired Navy admiral, David Jeremiah, to conduct an investigation. At the time, 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.' "
Jeremiah found that the United States had an insufficient number of satellites focussed on India; that the intelligence community's photograph analysts were overworked and undertrained; and that the C.I.A. had too few spies on the ground. But underscoring all this, Jeremiah said, was a particularly American sort of assumption: both intelligence analysts and policymakers assumed that the Indians would not test their nuclear weapons because Americans would not, in similar circumstances, test nuclear weapons. 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.
America's early assessment of bin Laden was similarly flawed. In the American mind, of course, the bin Laden of April, 1998, was not the bin Laden of September, 2001. But his intentions were no secret. Two months before the Richardson meeting, bin Laden had issued a fatwa, a religious ruling, in which he called on Muslims to kill Americans—civilians and military. Yet, among the group of Americans travelling with Richardson five years ago, the fatwa was a passing source of black humor; the threat seemed too outlandish to be taken seriously.
In the foreword to Roberta Wohlstetter's classic 1962 study, "Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision," the national-security expert Thomas Schelling wrote that America's ability to be surprised by the actions of its enemies is the result of a "poverty of expectations." He went on, "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."
Wohlstetter's work revealed that Pearl Harbor was not much of a surprise at all. It showed that the American government's fatal mistake was not a failure to pick up signals—overheard conversations, decoded cables, unusual ship movements—but a failure to separate out signals from noise, to understand which signals were meaningful, and to imagine that the Japanese might do something as irrational as attacking the headquarters of the U.S. Pacific fleet. In other words, the Americans heard the signals but didn't listen to them.
One day earlier this winter, I visited Fort Meade, outside Baltimore, which is the home of the National Security Agency, the country's main signals-intelligence group. The director of the N.S.A. is a cerebral, well-respected Air Force general named Michael Hayden, and I spoke to him about the challenges of signal collection. We sat in his office, a large room with a view of the N.S.A.'s obsessively guarded complex of black buildings. The office had been scrubbed of classified material in anticipation of my visit.
"Our noise-to-signal ratio is twenty to one, that one being something useful," Hayden told me. "Not necessarily tactically useful, just remotely useful. But even this is misleading, because it's twenty to one after we've done all sorts of things to make it humanly intelligible. You have to collect, process, translate, move it down the funnel, transform it from noise into a signal, before you know if it's useful."
I asked Hayden whether he thought Pearl Harbor or September 11th had been the greater surprise. "Pearl Harbor was, essentially, not a surprise," he said. "It was that one could not divine the meaningful signals from the thousands that were out there." He thought about the question a little longer and added, "I'm going to say, and I might change my mind, perhaps it was more a failure of imagination this time than last. We failed to see how absolute their"—Al Qaeda's—"world view is. A signals-intelligence agency gets inside the head of an adversary, if you're doing your job at all. You get to know the inside of a target. But I don't think we properly appreciated how capable and how different, how evil, that mind-set is."
Hayden also suggested that September 11th was the greater surprise, because the United States was, in effect, already at war with bin Laden. "Al Qaeda had attacked us before," he pointed out, "and we had a broad effort against the group." He noted that, after the 1998 bombings of two American embassies in East Africa, Tenet had told the intelligence community that he was "declaring war" on Al Qaeda. Nevertheless, Hayden said, America was surprised.
I asked Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense, the same question when, in late January, I met with him in his office in the Pentagon. Rumsfeld was moving troops to the Persian Gulf that day, but in our discussion he focussed on the role of surprise in intelligence failure. He wasn't interested in assigning blame for the failure to predict or stop the September 11th attacks; in fact, he objected when I used the word "failure," preferring, as Tenet does, the word "defeat." He said, "When you hear people criticizing the agency, I think it's important to reverse it and say, 'People ought to really critique how professional and how substantive the users of intelligence are in contributing critical feedback.' " In other words, the blame for "defeats" in intelligence can be ascribed as much to executive-branch policymakers and the intelligence committees of Congress as it can to Middle East analysts in the cubicles of the C.I.A. Echoing Moynihan's argument, Rumsfeld also said that policymakers mistakenly assume that information must be secret in order to have value. "There's something about me, I suppose, and others possibly, where we read intel and we begin to think that this is the sum total of what we know about a subject and not really go in and probe the open sources, which are rich in many cases," he said.
In the late nineteen-nineties, Rumsfeld, who was then working in private industry (he had already had one tour as Secretary of Defense, under President Ford), chaired a commission set up by Congress to examine the ballistic-missile programs of America's rivals and enemies. The commission, whose members included Rumsfeld's current deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, concluded that American intelligence agencies did not possess the analytic depth or the right methods of analysis to accurately assess the threat. "Intelligence assessments and estimates must be grounded in the facts," the commission concluded. "But to be useful, they cannot be limited to reporting only what is known about a particular program. Yet, in a large number of cases examined, Commissioners found analysts unwilling to make estimates that extended beyond the hard evidence they had in hand, which effectively precluded developing and testing alternative hypotheses about the actual foreign programs taking place."
Rumsfeld is especially drawn to Schelling's theory of surprise; he believes that surprise is often the by-product of analytical timidity. "The poverty of expectations—the failure of imagination—I found this just so interesting," Rumsfeld said. "We tend to hear what we expect to hear, whether it's bad or good. Human nature is that way. Unless something is jarring, you tend to stay on your track and get it reinforced rather than recalibrated. If I as a policymaker fail to make a conscious decision that you want to go around three hundred and sixty degrees and test things, you're likely to stay in a rut. And we've seen our country do that."
Rumsfeld believes that one long-held belief among Middle East analysts is overdue for reconsideration: the idea that doctrinal differences prevent Sunni and Shiite Muslims, and religious and secular Muslims, from pursuing common projects in anti-American terrorism. This is a subject of great relevance today, because the Bush Administration contends that Baghdad is a sponsor of Al Qaeda; critics of the Administration's foreign policy argue that bin Laden and Saddam Hussein are natural enemies. "The argument is that Al Qaeda has got a religious motivation, somehow or other, and the Iraqi regime is considered to be a secular regime," Rumsfeld said. "The answer to that is, so what? The Iraqi regime will use anything it can to its advantage. Why wouldn't they use any implement at hand?"
Rumsfeld's work on the ballistic-missile commission convinced him that intelligence analysts were not asking themselves the full range of questions on any given subject—including what they didn't know. Rumsfeld gave me a copy of some aphorisms he had collected during the process of assessing the ballistic-missile threat. "Some of these are humorous," he said, not quite accurately. One was "There are knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns." (The saying is attributed, naturally, to "Unknown.") "I think this construct is just powerful," Rumsfeld said. "The unknown unknowns, we do not even know we don't know them."
During the commission's hearings, Rumsfeld went on, intelligence analysts would brief the commission members. "They'd say, 'This is a fact.' And we'd say, 'Well, when did you learn it?' 'On this day, X.' 'And when did it start?' 'Back here, several years back.' And, of course, it's embarrassing. When you get some pieces of information, the implication is, you know, that you've done a good job. But the real question is: When did it actually start and when did we find out about it?"
In the case of the missile programs of two countries he would not name, he said, "There were instances in which we didn't know something until two, four, six, eight, twelve, and, in one case, thirteen years after it happened. If we didn't know this for five years, that means that there may very well be things that started five years ago that we don't know about at all."
Rumsfeld said that the ideas contained in the commission's report are spreading through the fourteen organizations that make up the intelligence community (these range from the Defense Intelligence Agency to Coast Guard intelligence). "You find not infrequently now that there will be a section, and it will have a fairly typical analysis, and then it will be followed by a section labelled 'What we don't know.' "
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.
"Rumsfeld should get a hell of a lot of credit for challenging the conventional wisdom, for challenging the bureaucracy," Tenet told me not long ago in his office at C.I.A. headquarters, in Langley, Virginia. Tenet, who does not conform to the patrician mold of the C.I.A.'s early directors—he is Greek-American and a proud son of Queens—seemed tired on the gray morning we met. His office is long and narrow; a torn American flag rescued from the ruins of the World Trade Center hung on the wall over his shoulder.
When Tenet and Rumsfeld talk about intelligence theory, it is hard to see major differences. Of his own agency Tenet said, "We spend a great deal of time encouraging analysts to get out of their own skins, to try to think the way the enemy thinks." He also said, "We're emphasizing the point, as the saying goes, that intelligence work is often not about evidence but about the absence of evidence." (Aides to both Tenet and Rumsfeld claim that their man devised this formula.)
Tenet, who became the C.I.A. director in 1997 (he was a Clinton appointee), gained the trust of President Bush early in the Administration, and he has survived thanks to the C.I.A.'s work during the war in Afghanistan; to his desire to rebuild the C.I.A.'s clandestine service, which had fallen into disrepair during the Clinton years; and to the fact that, while the C.I.A. committed major blunders in the days leading up to September 11th, the F.B.I.'s mistakes were catastrophic. In addition, he is able to communicate effectively on Capitol Hill.
In his office, Tenet listed questions that he thinks should be asked about the C.I.A.'s performance. "Are we making steady progress in penetration? Yes. Do we have success in technical intelligence-gathering? Yes. Did we stop the attacks? No." Tenet went on, "The Israelis probably have as ironclad a structure to deter terrorism as anybody in the world, but they continue to lose people. The way they think about this is that they are in a constant state of war and there are wins and losses in a war. This changes their mind-set." He added, "Failure means you're not paying attention. You knew about the target but you didn't do anything about it. Defeat is what happens in a war against an agile enemy who will find ways to beat you." |
