Hellfire Without Brimstone
02.19.2008 - 9:39 AMWe’ve been taking down the intelligence community a lot here at Connecting the Dots, and for good reason. The CIA’s failures in the run-up to 9/11, and then in Iraq, and more recently the confusion created by the National Intelligence Council regarding Iran’s nuclear program, are of major national significance. They leave the impression of an intelligence agency that, when it is not completely blind, is unable to make sense of what it seeing.
But let’s not get carried away. Let’s begin by remembering that there are some 80 stars on the wall at agency headquarters, commemorating CIA officers who died in the line of duty. One of them was Johnny Micheal Spann, who was killed in November 2001 in a prison uprising in Afghanistan as he was attempting to interrogate captured Taliban prisoners. He was posthumously awarded the Intelligence Star and the Exceptional Service Medallion.
And not only are there courageous men and women in the CIA, sometimes their courage results in action that is highly effective. Our impression of the agency is undoubtedly skewed because many of its successes go unheralded. And it is further skewed by those CIA officials who leave the agency’s employ to become public buffoons. Michael Scheuer, who has lied about his own CIA medal, is hardly alone in that category. There is an organization of ex-CIA officers who join him in his hybrid Chomskyite-Buchananite brand of politics. But still, we need to keep things in perspective; this is a handful of individuals who are no longer with the agency, and perhaps some of them were pushed out for incompetence or madness or both. The CIA is composed of thousands of officials, and it is an open question if these types are representative.
Today’s Washington Post reports on a CIA operation that went very well indeed.
In the predawn hours of Jan. 29, a CIA Predator aircraft flew in a slow arc above the Pakistani town of Mir Ali. The drone’s operator, relying on information secretly passed to the CIA by local informants, clicked a computer mouse and sent the first of two Hellfire missiles hurtling toward a cluster of mud-brick buildings a few miles from the town center.
To read what happened next, and to whom, click here.
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February 19th, 2008 at 3:34 PM
“The CIA is composed of thousands of officials, and it is an open question if these types are representative.”
The problem is that we cannot find out one way or another. It is my hunch, though, that the more recently hired CIA employees are primarily hired for their “adherence to the values of inclusion.” Only left wing whack jobs need apply. Both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush are politically correct whack jobs.
It is highly likely that they prefer those who embrace “elite” thinking.
February 20th, 2008 at 8:46 AM
Mike Spann died in the line of duty, at the hands of a dangerous enemy.
How many agents have died because leftists inside leaked to the New York Times and made it harder for the regular guys to do their jobs? How many efforts by the Bush administration to take on terrorists have been foiled by agents of the left who do things like inform the bad guys the attack is coming?
It doesn’t serve just to find out who the underminers are; I want to know what they’ve done.
Impossible in this life, but it’s what I want.
“Inclusion” isn’t a value. It’s a behavior. And if those whom you ‘include’ have plans to kill you, inclusion is dangerous folly.
February 20th, 2008 at 5:02 PM
The main issue we’ve been discussing on this blog is the CIA’s analysts, not their operatives nor their technical services. There are big problems in the Directorate of Operations as well, as people like Bob Baer have made clear in books like ‘See No Evil,’ but most of what the CIA does is analysis. The covert side is by far the smaller of the agency’s activities, which is not to diminish its importance. The culture of the analysts, usually tilting toward a benign view of our adversaries, has for the most part gone off the rails. My guess is that far too many share Scheuer’s core beliefs; they just have better sense to phrase their skewed and largely ideological point of view in ways more acceptable in polite Washington circles.
February 21st, 2008 at 1:19 AM
Actually, the intelligence analysis regarding the consequences of the invasion of Iraq and in the region were DEAD ON, and utterly neglected by the Bush administration and Congress. You can read them on the Senate’s website. The Bush administration asked for the intelligence on WMD and wanted it back to them on very short notice.
It is evident the Bush administration has tried to scapegoat the intel community for their failure to understand foreign relations, Middle East politics and society, as well as incompetence in executing strategies and policies.
Oh, and if you truly think the CIA is a bunch of liberals, then you are truly out of touch.
February 21st, 2008 at 12:08 PM
Actually, the NIC predictions about post-war Iraq were neither dead on nor ignored by the Bush administration.
The analyses featured at the Senate website emphasize sectarian strife in a post-Saddam Iraq, but do not address the most significant factors that have exploited, and in many cases simply superseded, sectarian strife: transnational wahhabist terrorism, and Iranian subversion. One does not read the NIC products (published in January 2003) and come away with the impression that either transnational wahhabism or Iran will be a problem. Discussions of Iran, in fact, focus on the motivating impact of Iraqi liberation on Iranian opposition groups. The possibility of Iranian state intervention, through the Qods Force, is not treated.
However, the “Principal Challenges in Post-Saddam Iraq” paper opines very clearly that an occupying force would be necessary to prevent divided groups within Iraq from tearing the country apart. This opinion, strongly endorsed by the State Department and advocated by CIA leadership, was the main reason for Bush’s decision to replace Jay Garner with Paul Bremer in early May 2003, and to NOT turn Iraqi governance over, to the Iraqi interim council that had been talking publicly about assuming the mantle in this transition for the last two weeks of April.
Almost everyone has forgotten that in April 2003, after Saddam fell, the real possibility existed of an Iraqi interim council taking over immediately, rather than the installation of the long-term Coalition Provisional Authority. It was precisely because he accepted the necessity of the occupation, advocated by his executive agencies (including intelligence), that Bush decided instead to beef up the CPA, and charter it with long-term supervision of Iraq’s path to autonomy.
As for whether CIA analysts are “liberals” or not: they tend to regard themselves as international “realists,” who are part of an elite that rises above the black and white simplicity of ideology. Intelligence is a pessimistic science to begin with, working off the observed patterns of humanity; it is more likely to predict instability and bloodshed than anything else, will probably be right about that more than 75% of the time, and will miss or dismiss trends at the outer level of human apprehension, such as the historical expansion of individual empowerment and political freedom in the modern world.
People look to intelligence — wrongly — to tell us if an objective is worth the cost. On such glass half-full/half-empty questions, however, “intelligence” is not the proper arbiter. What intelligence SHOULD do is accurately compute the costs for us. But since its practitioners start their analysis with opinions on whether the glass is half-full or half-empty, those opinions often influence the accuracy of their cost computations.
February 21st, 2008 at 7:56 PM
Graham: Clearly you have never met a CIA analyst. I have, plenty, and worked with many of them on lots of issues for quite a few years. J.E. is right in saying that they view themselves as realists, although I think quite a few would be comfortable with calling themselves liberal, and even more with calling themselves Democrats. That too many of the agency’s Middle East analysts completely missed the boat on Iraq is not surprising; the ones I met had access to information virtually no better than the public record, and many were not much better than grad students writing papers without the benefit of first-hand knowledge. At least that was my experience.
I would just add to J.E.’s takedown of your misconceptions of their Iraq analysis the following: there was no scapegoating by the Bush administration of the intelligence community whatsoever (giving George Tenet a medal is a funny way of scapegoating someone). The intelligence Bush got was the exact same Congress got, and none of it was cooked: two separate bipartisan reports (the 2004 Senate Intelligence Committee report and the Robb-Silberman Commission of 2005) said categorically that no analyst at any level in any intelligence agency was pressured by any administration officials to produce tainted reports.
February 21st, 2008 at 8:42 PM
What I learned and confirmed from the death of Johnny Michael Spann was that we are not dealing with a “traditional” adversary. The fact that Mr. Spann was armed and the Taliban were not was no reason for them not to attack him. We have to understand that these people do not seek self preservation and as General Myers said, they would chew through the hydraulic cables on the aircraft they were on to bring it down. The movie United Flight 93 had two distinct groups on board, those praying to God to survive and those pray to “god” to die. The instinct to survive is obviated by a blind faith in their purpose. On another note, the CIA, not unlike to State Department, attempts to hire applicants who most resemble themselves. Don’t expect any changes!
February 21st, 2008 at 9:50 PM
Graham? Hello, Graham? Earth to Graham?
You haven’t followed up on your regurgitated accusations. Why am I not surprised that you’re a drive-by troll?
I guess the uber left-wing hate sites you plagiarized those standard issue canards from don’t have answers to the facts you were rebutted with here. How unusual. The Senate’s website they referred to sure as Hell doesn’t. That’s the problem with left-wing websites like the Daily Kos, Huffington Post, etc. They’re nothing but echo chambers which spew partisan sophistry and lies without allowing any dissent from their party line to be expressed. (Fascism, anyone?) They don’t know how to deal with an honest debate.
Maybe you should try thinking for yourself like the folks here do. The comrades in your leftist groupthink tank will shun you, but you’ll be exposed to a world of experiences and possibilities that the rest of us take for granted. You won’t have to share the same brain with your fellow dogmatists, either. The truth will set you free. Truth to power!