Politics

Alright, last entry on this I swear! Thinking a little bit more about Pynchon’s new forward to 1984 and my response to one of his points, I realized that I had not yet made the point I wished to make.

In my last post on this subject, I outlined some of the strengths and weaknesses of the American system of governance. I want to make it clear that I was not attempting to excuse or defend abuses of the system; my intention was simply to explain how and why these abuses happen. Our government is a human construct, and as such it is apt to fail at some point or another. This world of ours is constantly changing, as are the threats to our way of life. My point was that our Founding Fathers recognized this and built in a degree of fault tolerance so as to allow for such failures. We cannot hope to plan for every possible outcome, we can only allow enough flexibility and adaptability to react swiftly and surely in the face of an emergency, correcting problems as we go along. Times of national crisis, such as war, can place an enormous amount of stress on the system, thus it is natural that such times will produce more component failures. This is not meant to excuse those failures, but rather to explain them.

Pynchon points out that “One could certainly argue that Churchill’s war cabinet had behaved on occasion no differently from a fascist regime, censoring news, controlling wages and prices, restricting travel, subordinating civil liberties to self-defined wartime necessity.” Indeed one could argue this, but then one would have to understand, as Pynchon himself noted, that the wartime powers led by Churchill were immediately booted out of power by the British electorate the first chance they got (in a landslide victory for the Labour party). A few years later, America ratified the 22nd amendment (which officially codified the precedent set by George Washington that no president should serve more than two terms. FDR died a few months after his fourth inauguration, and while many were no doubt comforted by FDR’s presence in the White House, they were also somewhat scared by the possibility of someone becoming intoxicated with the power of the Presidency and attempting to become “President-for-Life”.) In the Soviet Union, tens of millions of peasants were slaughtered to force collectivization.

The reason the British and American systems fared better than the Soviet system was not just because the British and American systems were better than the Soviet system on an absolute scale, but rather because our systems were designed to handle failures and adapt to changing times while the Soviet system was rigid and unchanging (and also denied human nature, but that is a whole different can of worms).

I was thinking more about Pynchon’s new forward to 1984, and I wanted to expand on my disagreement with his assertion that 1984 is not only a warning against the dangers of communism but that it also equally applies to the current US administration. I granted the general point, but rejected the notion that we were actually headed in that direction (to be fair, Pynchon didn’t come out and directly say we’re headed towards totalitarianism, but you could certainly read him that way).

The point of a law is to discourage people from committing certain actions. Alas, this does not mean that people will automatically follow that law, which is why our system clearly specifies consequences for when a law is broken. Fines, jail time, whatever… the point is that just because we pass a law, that doesn’t mean we assume everyone will follow that law. Indeed, we know they won’t, which is why we set up various forms of punishment and rehabilitation.

On a more systemic level, our country operates with a set of limited governance. The power is split between the federal and state governments, with the federal government further divided into three branches including an independent judiciary. Going even further than that, this power is granted to the government by the people, and we submit to it voluntarily. We don’t give away this power unconditionally though, and as such, we have clear ways with which to express our displeasure with the government’s actions. Our Founding Fathers had a deep distrust of government; they believed that any excess power that a government has will eventually be abused, so they made it very clear in our Constitution what the government was permitted to do and what it was forbidden to do.

However, just because the government is forbidden to do something doesn’t mean it won’t do it, similar to how laws do not imply a complete cessation of the acts they forbid. Indeed, that our Founding Fathers clearly laid out methods to remove those in power implies that they knew that power would be abused. They divided the powers granted to our government because they knew that individuals in the government would attempt to abuse that power. They further provided the people with direct and indirect ways to correct any problems with the government.

This is an example of what is called fault tolerance. The idea is to make a system robust enough so that variations in use or a chance of component failure won’t cause the overall system to crash. Generally this is achieved by introducing a certain amount of redundancy into the system or perhaps allowing a system to fail gracefully. In a system that is fault tolerant, when some component fails, a backup component kicks in and the system continues to operate at acceptable levels while the initial failure is corrected (obviously, its more complicated than that, but you get the point).

The American system of governance has shown a lot of resilience and flexibility in its history. Part of this is due to our inherent freedoms. Freedom of speech, for example, has the fortunate attribute of allowing dangerous people make fools of themselves. “No free speech produces Hitler. Free speech produces David Duke.” (I don’t remember who said that, but its a good line:) Our system is not devoid of abuses of power (component failures), but we have shown on many occasions that these abuses of power can be worked out within our system.

The 18th Amendment provides us with an excellent example:

After one year from the ratification of this article the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States and all territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof for beverage purposes is hereby prohibited.

There is a lot to be said about this, but what it comes down to is this: The 18th Amendment was essentially infringing upon our natural rights (which are inherently protected by the 9th Amendment). It ultimately destroyed more liberty than it created, and it was completely incompatible with the basic concepts of our system. It is also the only Amendment that’s ever been repealed (by the 21st Amendment). One of the things we found out during the course of Prohibition was that, on a practical level, the government was incapable of enforcing such a thing. Ratification of the 18th Amendment formally granted power to the government to implement Prohibition, but that didn’t stop people from drinking (Rex Banner: “What kind of pet shop is filled with rambunctious yahoos and hot jazz music at 1:00 in the morning?” Moe: “Er, uh… the… best damn pet shop in town!” Crowd: “Yeah!” Heh).

Another example of the strength of our system is Congress’ power to impeach and convict a President, removing him from office. The official criteria for an impeachment is “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors,” but in practice an impeachable offense is whatever Congress says it is. When it became clear that Richard Nixon had committed an egregious crime (obstruction of justice), he stepped down to avoid being prosecuted and there was a peaceful transfer of power as defined in our system.

The 18th Amendment and the Nixon scandal are examples of component failures, but also of systemic success. That they were able to wrong the nation does not imply that our nation as a whole has failed. Our system is explicitly designed to handle such failures and though it may not do so perfectly (or very quickly), it has done so adequately in the past and it appears to be in working order now. It also has mechanisms built into it that allow us to improve upon the system itself. Of course, I suppose it is possible to pervert those same mechanisms to degrade the system. The “War on Terror” is shaping up to be a long one, and while what we’re seeing at the start is a lot of potential abuse, that doesn’t mean we’re headed towards a totalitarian state. Ironically, a sure sign that we are headed down that road would be if we could find no examples of abuse, as that would mean our government is acting perfectly. And we all know how likely that is.

I had an interesting debate with a liberal friend of mine at the 4degreez.com politics board last week. I was being completely antagonistic and unfair; basically picking a fight, but it was fun, in a way, to see the reactions. It was an attempt to point out the irony that dominates the BUSH LIED! meme. I can’t say as though I know how successful I was. It’s a little long, but I think its interesting reading nonetheless (worthy of a skim at least)… My basic refrain ended up being some variation of this question:

Why is it acceptable for you to bend facts and selectively quote an interview to make your point?

Heh. Thanks to Eugene Volokh’s NRO article and Porphyrogenitus’ comments on the BUSH LIED! meme, as they helped me flesh out some of the ideas and are worth of reads on their own…

The thread is reproduced here on my site with permission, as the 4degreez Politics board is not public and the site is no longer accepting new members. Some of the code that is used to format the indentation for the thread is ancient, so some browsers might have trouble displaying it. The thread, however, is linear enough that it doesn’t really matter…

A new column by artist Steve Mumford is up, and, as usual, he paints a picture of Iraq that is quite different from that which we’ve been seeing in the media. Like his other Baghdad Journal entries, he doesn’t downplay the problems, to be sure, but neither does he overplay them and he will actually talk about good things that are happening in Iraq. It makes for refreshingly balanced reading. Read the whole thing…

Trying to measure the success or failure of the occupation is like the proverbial group of blind men attempting to describe an elephant: each person tends to see the war and its aftermath differently, through the prism of their own ideology and experience. Some people talk about the children who died as a result of the sanctions, some talk about the thousands of Iraqis murdered by Saddam.

Watching the BBC here in Baghdad, I get the impression that the war has left a state of worsening chaos throughout the country. Walking through the streets I often have the opposite feeling. Then a bomb goes off somewhere and I brace myself for worse times ahead.

If only the media could get it right. Speaking of which, Glenn Reynolds has an interesting roundup of letters from non-journalists, which again paint a picture that is very different from the one we’re getting from the media. On his blog, he even points out a valid criticism of his approach:

A more valid criticism of my posts would be that they’re anecdotal, and don’t show the big picture. That’s true — and as Daniel Drezner has noted, there may not be a coherent single narrative on Iraq right now.

But that, of course, is my point. The Big Media have created a coherent single narrative (call it Vietnam II: Reloaded) and they’re engaged in selective reporting to maintain that narrative…

Anecdotal or not, you’d think we’d be hearing more about them from the media, instead of our buddies coming back and asking us what in the hell is going on with the news…

I meant to write more, but I’m out of time and I’ll be sippin by the river this afternoon, so I probably won’t be in any condition to revise this later on…

Update – Lex beat me to it…

Update 9.22.03 – I’m still recovering from the sippin by the river extravaganza, but Glenn Reynolds has a good follow up piece at MSNBC. Also of note is a recent Michael Barone article which laments:

Today’s media have a zero-defect standard: the Bush administration should have anticipated every eventuality and made detailed plans for every contingency. This is silly. A good second-grade teacher arrives in class with a lesson plan but adapts and adjusts to pupils’ responses and the classroom atmosphere. A good occupying power does the same thing.

This isn’t the first time that the media’s “zero-defect standard” has come into play, even with respect to Iraq. Does anyone remember the third day of war? After two days of amazing success, we slowed down for a moment (ostensibly to let our troops rest, revise our plans, and allow air power to pave the way) and the media proclaimed that the war had suddenly gone wrong!

The issue of Iraq seeking uranium in Africa has been interesting to me. The now infamous sixteen words in the State of the Union speech have caused untold controversy in the past few weeks, as the Bush Administration attempted to respond to critics (poorly, I might add – this is seemingly an exercise in what not to do when responding to a potential scandal). I’ve done a lot of reading, arguing, and head scratching in the past few weeks, and I thought I’d try and collect some of the pertinent information and perhaps some commentary I found particularly convincing.

To start, I’d like to go back to original sources. As usual, media accounts are varied and contradictory, so I find that going back to the transcripts is usually an enlightening experience. So here are some important transcripts and document excerpts (some of which have just recently become available… to me, at least):

• Transcript of State of the Union – Part 8: Iraq (January 28, 2003)
• Transcript of Powell’s U.N. presentation (February 5, 2003) Alternate (without pictures)
• UK Iraq dossier (September 24, 2002)
• Excerpts from NIE Key Judgments From the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate.
• White House background briefing (July 18, 2003) Makes extensive reference to the above link to the excerpts from the October NIE.

First things first, the infamous 16:

“The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”

Now I’m going to try and summarize the general questions and the administration’s answers. The administration has done a poor job answering the questions and when compounded with the media’s contradictory accounts, the picture has become somewhat muddled. I encourage you to read all of the information in the transcripts above, especially the White House background briefing and to form an opinion of your own. I am certainly not the authority on this matter, I just thought a summary was due.

Has the British government learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa?

The September 2002 British dossier was the source for the infamous 16 words, and has not yet been shown to be false. Much of the controversy hinges on a set of forged documents obtained by U.S. intelligence (these documents allegedly came from an Italian source. The forgeries, as published by the Italian paper La Repubblica, were posted at Cryptome.org). When these were shown to be false, it was assumed that the British intelligence was also false or based on the same forged documents. However, the British government maintains to this day that it’s intelligence is reliable and completely separate from the forged documents. The British intelligence came from at least one, possibly 2, outside intelligence services. British intelligence is bound by bilateral agreements not to share this information without the originator’s permission. There is some speculation that the French are behind the British intelligence, as Niger is a former French colony and its uranium mines are run by a French company that comes under the control of the French Atomic Energy Commission. Given the U.S. government’s relationship with the French government over the past year, it would be easy to see why France would not want to grant the permission to share such intelligence, but this is again just speculation. Obviously, I have not seen the British reports, and thus cannot comment on it authoritatively.

So did Bush lie or not?

It appears that he did not. His statement in the SOTU was a general one, and it was referencing the September 2002 British dossier. The statement was based on a “body of evidence,” not any single piece of information. The British information appeared to match up with the information in the October 2002 NIE. The statement did not say that Iraq had actually succeeded in purchasing uranium ore, nor did it specifically mention Niger. It said that Iraq “sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”

Wait, if Bush did not lie, then why has the administration acknowledged a mistake was made? What, precisely, was the mistake?

Despite this question being asked several times, I am still somewhat confused by the specifics given by administration officials (an example of how poorly they’ve communicated in the past few weeks). There appears to have been a communications breakdown within the CIA or between the CIA and the White House. That seems to be what they are apologizing for. As near as I can tell, in September of 2002, when the British government released their dossier, the CIA expressed some doubts to the British as to the authenticity of the claim that Iraq was seeking uranium in Africa. The British insisted that their intelligence was genuine, and apparently the matter was dropped. George Tenet testified that he should have taken this into consideration when approving the SOTU, despite the fact that he was apparently unaware of the complaint (I’m not sure I have that right, however). Also, it has been said that in hindsight, what is now known about the forged documents would have played a larger part in the decision.

If this information was in the October 2002 NIE, why did the SOTU reference the British dossier?

The SOTU obviously goes through many drafts. In an early draft, the section regarding Iraq’s weapons programs made a series of assertions (“We know Saddam has X. We know Saddam has Y.” etc…). Apparently what happened was, as they went from one draft to the next, they thought “it would be much more credible, much more explanatory to the American people to explain how [they] knew these things.” So the administration asked the speechwriters to fill in the sources of this information. Naturally, they wanted to use public sources if they were available, including UN information, IAEA information, and Iraqi defectors’ information. In this particular case, there were two sources available: The October 2002 NIE, which was still highly classified at the time, and the British dossier which had already been made public. Given that choice, they cited the British document.

Is it not true that George Tenet asked the speechwriters for a speech Bush delivered in Cincinnati to remove this information? If so, why did he fail to remove it from the SOTU?

The information that was to be included in the Cincinnati speech was very specific to a specific intelligence report. It was a “foreign-based, single-sourced intelligence source.” Tenet’s objection was that the President shouldn’t cite specifics that are based on a single source. Intelligence is often backed up by multiple sources of information and he felt that that was not appropriate to include a reference to specific quantities mentioned in a single source.

But if the information was so flawed that it was prudent to remove it from the Cincinnati speech, why was it included in the SOTU?

It was not known at the time that the information was flawed (or, at least, that was not the reason it was removed from the speech). That was shown later by the forged documents. The reason it was removed from the Cincinnati speech was because it was based on a single source and it referenced specific amounts, not because it was flawed and that is a critical distinction.

So what’s the big deal?

There seems to be a great deal of confusion about the matter. The account outlined above may not be entirely true, its just what I have been able to glean from the administration (and there is more to it than what is outlined above, of course – I did not even get into Ambassador Wilson’s visit to Niger, for example). Those who are truly concerned about the matter are not so much concerned solely by the uranium line, but they think there was an effort to mislead the public by presenting ambiguous intelligence as fact. What matters to critics is whether the Bush administration went beyond ethical bounds in manipulating the intelligence information they had to sell the war. Certainly a worthwhile effort, but in my opinion the shame of the uranium debacle is that it is not really indicative of a malicious effort to sell the war, and thus a lot of good questions are not garnering the attention they deserve.

To conclude, I’m going list out a few links with commentary about the issue. If you find something that you feel should be linked here, feel free to email me or post a comment below.

• Glenn Reynolds over at InstaPundit has been routinely collecting links and commentary about the affair and has proven to be a valuable resource for the debate.
• As I mentioned above, the amount of time and attention paid to the uranium claim only serves to lessen the credibility of what is surely an important debate. The Democrats have pounced on the claim, but again, this will only serve to strengthen them in the short term, if at all. Especially given that there are plenty of things the Democrats could be focusing on, even with regards to national security.
• Porphyrogenitus has made a few excellent posts about the situation: His Ten Real Lies (?) We Were Told About Iraq is a little snarky and satirical, but his follow up is an excellent summary of the situation, one of the best I’ve seen yet. A quote:
  

  So one looks at things like the Uranium intel, which some don’t see as conclusive (a much fairer way of putting things than “lie”, by the way, but the Propaganda Model is driven by things that will whip people into a frenzy, and “it wasn’t conclusive but they decided to put it in anyhow and they took it seriously in light of the other information they had” simply isn’t as melodramatic as “BUSH LIED! BUSH OFFICIALS ADMITTED THEY LIED!! LIES EXPOSED!!!” to paraphrase Tim Noah’s Slate article.)

  Its an excellent post. Read the whole thing, as they say. What the hell, here’s another quote, just for good measure:

  The point I was making is that intelligence is imperfect and even wrong intel does not amount to a lie. It could even be asserted, fairly (I’m not sure if it would be true, but it would be fairer accusation than the “Bush Lied” meme) that the Bush administration really wanted to believe this was true and so were inclined to accept at face value something that was more dubious than should have been given credence; groupthink happens. But that, too, would not serve the Propaganda Model as well (it’s harder to whip people into a frenzy over an administration that’s prepared to think the worst of a man like Saddam Hussein. IMO it’s more deplorable for people to be prepared to give a man like Saddam Hussein the benefit of every doubt and cast everything done by Bush and Blair in the most malevolent light possible).

• As I mentioned, the Democrats are pouncing on this. Here are statements from:
  • Senator Carl Levin (D-MI) listed out problematic assertions involving intelligence on Iraq in a floor statement on 7/15/03
  • Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), apparently among the first and biggest critics of the uranium story, wrote a long letter to the House Intelligence Committee outlining his view of the “four categories of unanswered questions” that the story presents (the letter, along with some other correspondence is included in that link).
  • Rep. David Obey (D-WI) questioned the role and structure of defense intelligence in a 7/8/03 floor statement.
  • Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV) made a statement on 6/24/03 regarding the subject.

  I had already linked to the Byrd statement a few weeks ago, and I think my main criticism still holds, and to a certain extent can be applied to other Congressional critics. Essentially, it seems somewhat ironic that Congress is choosing now to examine the intelligence that was brought before them, rather than examining it in October, before they authorized war…

• As you may have noticed, FAS’s Intelligence Resource Program has also been and indispensible resource in keeping track of the situation. CNN also has a decent transcript service, though I’ve had some trouble finding some transcripts that I would like to have seen…

Well, that about wraps it up for now. I’m probably going to try and collect some more links, especially for the “Bush Lied!” crowd, as they are somewhat underrepresented above. Again, if you have any information that you think I should include, post it below or send me an email.

Tacitus threw out a brief mention of the Black Book of Communism and the Cambodian Genocide Program a few days ago, and it got me thinking. I’ve often debated politics in various forums, and I would sometimes come across someone who would claim that the U.S. was actually the worst source of pain, suffering, and death in recent history. I’ve never quite known how to respond to such arguments, much less understand how someone can even say so with a straight face. This is not to minimize American mistakes. We’ve made our fair share, and many have suffered because of that. But when you look at the actual numbers, it’s difficult to see how the U.S. even begins to approach the horrors of Communism or fascism. When I see the estimates that Communism has killed anywhere from 85 to 100 million people, I have to wonder what those who minimize these horrors are thinking.

Indeed, its quite difficult to even internalize that many deaths. I know the numbers, but they’re not quite real or comprehensible to me. Perhaps the answer lies there.

C. Northcote Parkinson, in his excellent book Parkinson’s Law, wrote a short essay called High Finance or The Point of Vanishing Interest (the entire book is superb; filled with wry observations about the nature of the world which have held up over time). In it, he speculates on the nature of financial committees.

People who understand high finance are of two kinds: those who have vast fortunes of their own and those who have nothing at all. To the actual millionaire a million dollars is something real and comprehensible. To the applied mathematician and the lecturer in economics (assuming both to be practically starving) a million dollars is at least as real as a thousand, they having never possessed either sum. But the world is full of people who fall between these two categories, knowing nothing of millions but well accustomed to think in thousands, and it is these that finance committees are mostly comprised.

He then postulates what might be termed the “Law of Triviality”. Briefly stated, it means that the time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum involved. Thus he concludes, after a number of humorous but fitting examples, that there is a point of vanishing interest where the committee can no longer comment with authority. Astonishingly, the amount of time that is spent on $10 million and on $10 may well be the same. There is clearly a space of time which suffices equally for the largest and smallest sums.

So what does that have to do with Communism? Joseph Stalin infamously said “One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic.” Its clear that he understood the same thing Parkinson understood: there are few who can internalize numbers that high. Thus when discussing, say, American and Soviet misdeeds of the past century, an incident in which millions of deaths are directly caused by the Soviet actions are given the same time and credence (actually, often significantly less time and credence) as an instance in which thousands of deaths are directly caused by U.S. actions. Given the lack of focus on the larger tragedies of the world, and the magnifying lens that is usually applied to U.S. policy, is it any wonder that there are those who believe the U.S. to be the single worst source of pain and misery in the world? Its not, and unfortunately, I see no way to counteract this sort of thinking.

The only consolation is that the U.S. is only strengthened by such excessive criticism; at least, I would hope we are – we are certainly not saints, and while I do believe our system to be superior to Communism (which ain’t saying much, I know), it is far from perfect (in our struggle against communism during the Cold War, we have sacrificed many of our finest values in order to maintain stability, for instance). We can only improve if we are criticized, and it is a testament to our system that there is so much criticism because it is assumed that such a criticism can actually make a difference…

Update 7.14.03 – Something doesn’t quite sit right with me about this essay. I don’t exactly know how to explain it, but its, well, its such a clinical view of the situation. I’m only talking about numbers here, but there is a whole lot more to it than just a number of deaths, and I don’t mean to imply otherwise.

The Lie That Linked CIA to the Kennedy Assassination by Max Holland : This makes for interesting reading as a follow up to Sunday’s post about conspiracy theories and JFK in particular. It follows the theory from its origins in the infamous Italian newspaper, Paese Sera (a known Soviet propaganda outlet), and Jim Garrison’s own investigation into JFK’s assassination. Interestingly enough, the merits of both the story and the investigation were highly dubious, but they both appeared around the same time, and tended to feed upon each other lending a perceived credibility to both. Garrison’s investigation was drawing massive criticism from the public, but when he leaked Paese Sera‘s story to a local newspaper, his troubles disappeared as fresh accusations of wrongdoing in the CIA spread throughout the world (which only served to blunt the criticism of Garrison’s probe). “The impression left was that Garrison was being put under siege because he dared to tell the truth.”

The CIA, though deeply concerned by these happenings, was more or less compelled to keep their mouth shut during the entire affair. Its debatable whether or not this was a wise thing to do, but, as CIA chief Ray Rocca noted, the “impact of such charges… will not depend principally upon their veracity or credibility but rather upon their timeliness and the extent of press coverage.” By the time the case against Clay Shaw went to trial in January of 1969, the CIA’s apprehension was palpable. In the end, the trial was a bit anti-climactic. The CIA wasn’t even mentioned during the trial.

Garrison’s pursuit of Shaw was now widely regarded as a legal farce and a fraud. The episode had even precipitated a bitter split among the many critics of the Warren Commission report on the assassination, nearly all of whom had flocked to Garrison’s side in 1967. Now many of them considered the Orleans Parish DA to be the Joe McCarthy of their cause. Just as the Wisconsin senator disgraced anti-Communism by making reckless charges that ruined innocent peoples’ lives, they believed that Garrison had irrevocably set back the case against the Warren Report by persecuting an innocent man.

Which is sort of the point I was making on Sunday (Oliver Stone was attempting to convince us that we should not trust the government, but he chose such a flimsy example that he ultimately hurt his cause). You’d think the story would end there, but it didn’t. Garrison never really gave up, and even after some further unsuccessful legal wrangling, actually saw some success:

An abject failure in courts of law, Garrison’s probe achieved a latent triumph in the court of public opinion. The DA’s message became part and parcel of what has been called “the enduring power of the 1960s in the national imagination.”

In 1988, Garrison was finally able to get his memoir published, and in it, he outlined his conspiracy theory, CIA connection and all. It found its way into the hands of Oliver Stone, and the rest is history. The film was very popular and created a public clamor for millions of pages of documents that had been “suppressed” as part of the government’s alleged massive cover-up. In 1992, the President�John F. Kennedy Records Collection Act was passed, releasing a surprising amount of records relating to the assassination. Stone likes to claim that his film is solely responsible for that legislation, but its worth noting that the “coincidental end of the Cold War also played a critical role in the enactment and implementation of the 1992 law.” Stone also likes to claim that the records prove that there was a cover up, but, as Holland concludes, that’s really not the case:

Far from validating the film’s hero, the new documents have finally lifted the lid on the disinformation that was at the core of Jim Garrison’s unrelenting probe. The declassified CIA records document that everything in the Paese Sera story was a lie, and, simultaneously, reveal the genuine nature and duration of Clay Shaw’s innocuous link to the CIA. These same records explain why the CIA never responded appropriately to the disinformation, as it had in Helms’s 1961 Senate testimony and would later do in swift response to such schemes in the 1980s. Finally, the personal files turned over by Garrison’s family underline the profound impact that one newspaper clipping had on a mendacious district attorney adept at manipulating the Zeitgeist of the late 1960s.

The shame of it all is that the Warren Commission Report really isn’t satisfactory, and the overzealous conspiracy theory forwarded by Garrison and Stone was far enough off course to discredit the case against the Warren Report.

Of course you should know all of this is a lie, as the article I’m referencing is coming from the CIA itself, and they are, by default, lying. Right?

Connecting the Dots by Malcolm Gladwell : A thoughtful counter-point to the arguments posited after 9/11 that the CIA and FBI failed to accurately assess all of the intelligence pointing towards a major terrorist attack. Gladwell argues that the clarity presented in these arguments, such as the one in the book The Cell or the passionate and detailed report made by Senator Richard Shelby in December, are an example of 20/20 hindsight, or what he calls “creeping determinism”. A term coined thirty years ago by psychologist Baruch Fischhoff, creeping determinism refers to “the sense that grows on us, in retrospect, that what has happened was actually inevitable”.

Its an obvious point, but it operates on several levels, and almost every major war provides us with an example. We look back on the Union’s victory in the Civil War or the Allies victory in WWII with a sense of inevitability; that those victories were a foregone conclusion. But such was not the case. We all know the Allies won WWII, but such a conclusion was unthinkable in 1940 London, and the Union didn’t exactly thrash the South in the early days of the war. Of course, the concept is much broader and includes other situations than war as well…

So was the “intelligence failure” of 9/11 really a case of ineffective intelligence analysis, or just another example of creeping determinism? Its easy, in retrospect, to look back on the evidence of a major terrorist attack and conclude that our intelligence agencies failed to “connect the dots”, but what we are seeing is really a distortion caused by the clarity of all that evidence. What we are seeing is what is called in information theory, signal, and what we are not seeing is noise. Sure, there was lots of evidence pointing towards a major terrorist attack, but what we “don’t hear about is all the other people whom American intelligence had under surveillance, how many other warnings they received, and how many other tips came in that seemed promising at the time but led nowhere.” When you get threats of bombings and attacks all the time, how do you distinguish between the signal and the noise? Which attack is the one that will actually happen? These aren’t limitations of our intelligence community, these are limitations on intelligence itself. “In the real world, intelligence is invariably ambiguous.”

As such, there is no such thing as a perfect intelligence community. Every choice you make involves tradeoffs, and its not exactly clear which choices are the right ones. For instance, Shelby talks about the relationship between the CIA and FBI disapprovingly, noting their failure to share information promptly and efficiently between (and within) organizations. But Gladwell points out that it is just as easy to make a case for the old system, where organizations competed with one another. ” Isn’t it an advantage that the F.B.I. doesn’t think like the C.I.A.?”

As you can see, going over the evidence and the arguments can be frustrating. On the one hand, when you can look back on events knowing the outcome, the evidence seems obvious, but was it so obvious at the time? And why aren’t we fixing it now?

Today, the F.B.I. gives us color-coded warnings and speaks of “increased chatter” among terrorist operatives, and the information is infuriating to us because it is so vague. What does “increased chatter” mean? We want a prediction. We want to believe that the intentions of our enemies are a puzzle that intelligence services can piece together, so that a clear story emerges. But there rarely is a clear story–at least, not until afterward, when some enterprising journalist or investigative committee decides to write one.

There’s no way to fix the limitations of intelligence itself. We can make changes to our intelligence systems, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we’ll be making progress. We’re not so much solving a problem as we’re trading one set of disadvantages for another. The trick is figuring out which situation is beter than the other, which isn’t as easy as it sounds…

Stability, America’s Enemy by Ralph Peters : Perceptive and knowledgeable, Peters never ceases to amaze me. This essay is one of his classics, and in it he makes a compelling argument that a blind commitment to stability as and ends unto itself is not necessarily the best idea.

America’s finest values are sacrificed to keep bad governments in place, dysfunctional borders intact, and oppressed human beings well-behaved. In one of the greatest acts of self-betrayal in history, the nation that long was the catalyst of global change and which remains the beneficiary of international upheaval has made stability its diplomatic god.

As I noted below, the US has a tendency to hold stability sacred, and it has proved to be a mistake as we’ve strived to maintain a bad status quo. We need to lock Peters and Wass de Czege in room together and see what they come up with.

Peters, by the way, is the most intelligent commentator I’ve seen during this war. He has been writing editorials (such as this one) for the NY Post at a feverish pace, and though the pieces are less… polished than the above Parameters piece, they are no less perceptive. Its difficult to find previous pieces on the NY Post website, though. Perhaps I’ll try and collect some of his better ones, as they don’t seem to be inacessible…