NYTimes.com Article: Op-Ed Columnist: The C.I.A.: Method and Madness

[kvscanty@pacbell.net]

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I know this doesn't appear to be an anti-testing article but I think it sums up the problem perfectly...karen

kvscanty@pacbell.net


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Op-Ed Columnist: The C.I.A.: Method and Madness

February 3, 2004
 By DAVID BROOKS 



 

After speaking to "innumerable" U.S. intelligence officers,
David Kay has concluded that Bush administration officials
did not pressure analysts to exaggerate the threats posed
by Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. On Capitol Hill, the
Senate Intelligence Committee staff has interviewed over
175 analysts and critics and reached the same conclusion. 

Leading the C.I.A.'s own internal review, Richard Kerr has
apparently also concluded that there is no evidence that
political pressures influenced the C.I.A. reports. 

And this is precisely the problem. 

For decades, the U.S.
intelligence community has propagated the myth that it
possesses analytical methods that must be insulated
pristinely from the hurly-burly world of politics. The
C.I.A. has portrayed itself as, and been treated as, a sort
of National Weather Service of global affairs. It has
relied on this aura of scientific objectivity for its
prestige, and to justify its large budgets, despite a
record studded with error. 

The C.I.A.'s scientific pretensions were established early
on by Sherman Kent. In his 1949 book "Strategic
Intelligence for American World Policy," Kent argued that
the truth is to be approached through a systematic method,
"much like the method of the physical sciences." 

This was at a time, just after the war, when economists,
urban planners and social engineers believed that human
affairs could be understood scientifically, and that the
social sciences could come to resemble hard sciences like
physics. 

If you read C.I.A. literature today, you can still see
scientism in full bloom. The tone is cold, formal,
depersonalized and laden with jargon. You can sense how the
technocratic process has factored out all those insights
that may be the product of an individual's intuition and
imagination, and emphasized instead the sort of data that
can be processed by an organization. 

This false scientism was bad enough during the cold war,
when the intelligence community failed to anticipate
seemingly nonrational events like the Iran-Iraq war or the
Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. But it is terrible now in
the age of terror, because terror is largely nonrational. 

What kind of scientific framework can explain the rage for
suicide bombings, now sweeping the Middle East? What
technocratic mentality can really grasp the sadistic
monster who was pulled out of the spider hole a few weeks
ago? Under Saddam, Iraqi society seems to have been in a
state of advanced decomposition, with drastic consequences
for its W.M.D. program. How can corruption and madness be
understood by analysts in Langley, who have a tendency to
impose a false order on reality? 

We're in a heck of a bind. In the age of global terror and
W.M.D., we can't wait until threats are right on top of us.
And yet, given the errors over Iraqi W.M.D. stockpiles,
we're going to find it very difficult to act preventively
because we won't be able to have confidence in our
information. 

The people at the C.I.A. understand the problem: on the
C.I.A. Web site, you can find a book called "Psychology of
Intelligence Analysis," which details the community's blind
spots. But the C.I.A. can't correct itself by being a
better version of itself. The methodology is the problem. 

When it comes to understanding the world's thugs and
menaces, I'd trust the first 40 names in James Carville's
P.D.A. faster than I'd trust a conference-load of game
theorists or risk-assessment officers. I'd trust
politicians, who, whatever their faults, have finely tuned
antennae for the flow of events. I'd trust Mafia bosses,
studio heads and anybody who has read a Dostoyevsky novel
during the past five years. 

Most of all, I'd trust individuals over organizations.
Individuals can use intuition, experience and a feel for
the landscape of reality. When you read an individual's
essay, you know you're reading one person's best guess, not
a falsely authoritative scientific finding. 

So when the president names the members of intelligence
review commission, I hope he won't just select people who
are products of the old methodology. I hope he'll pick
people who will fundamentally rethink intelligence. And I
hope he'll throw in a few political hacks, just for a
little reality.   

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/03/opinion/03BROO.html?ex=1076822915&ei=1&en=dcdde85a09d69b9e


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