The U.S. intelligence community has failed. We have failed as a public institution and as a profession. We have failed not because of 9/11, or Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction, or Iran's supposed WMD, or the horror stories about renditions and detentions. We have failed because we have not explained ourselves adequately and comprehensibly to the public -- describing our role, the limits within which we work and our view of what can be reasonably expected from us. We have failed because we have allowed ourselves to be caricatured, vilified and misrepresented by people who do not know us, do not like us and do not understand us -- or simply see us as convenient fall guys.
We have been, in a word, supine. And the net result has been a misguided restructuring of the entire intelligence community based on faulty premises. Inside the community, our passivity has meant crippled morale; outside the community, it has meant a severely diminished view of the value of the crucial, difficult tasks we perform. And we have allowed others to burden us with entirely false and unrealistic expectations.
This isn't meant as a critique of the current director of national intelligence, Mike McConnell; his predecessor, John D. Negroponte; or their staffs. They've done the best they could within a dysfunctional structure. But the fact remains that intelligence is now largely fated to be seen as a failed institution. It has also become a highly politicized one, which further dooms its future effectiveness. And that is a problem for all Americans, not just former intelligence analysts like myself.
The intelligence community's predicament was largely forged by two very different events: the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the failure to find WMD in Iraq. But the lessons that outsiders have learned from these two watersheds have often been glib, fatuous and contradictory.
< snip >
The blunt truth? The intelligence community would be far better off scrapping NIEs altogether and going to a streamlined, better written product similar to the sharper assessments produced in Britain and Australia. And if we are going to be serious about improving intelligence analysis, we have to stop publishing the end products -- even in redacted forms that can show up in the pages of this newspaper. More than anything else, this certainty that internal assessments will wind up on public display stifles the vibrant, edgy, out-of-the-box analysis that everyone says they want -- until it disagrees with their political point of view, of course.
Intelligence is not in the business of predicting or forecasting. Intelligence tends to do worse on the "big events" (Pearl Harbor, 9/11, the fall of the Berlin Wall) because these events, by their very nature, are counterfactual or surprising. Nor can intelligence eliminate the element of surprise.
Intelligence is actually good at something that can seem awfully mundane: keeping policymakers generally well-informed on a recurring basis so that they can make decisions with a reasonable sense of confidence. Given the frequency with which this occurs -- as opposed to the headline-grabbing crises -- this is no small service. Unfortunately, it is also no longer one that many people seem to value.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/22/AR2008052202961.htmlThis article is well worth reading in its entirely.
