Boston Herald City Editor and columnist Jules Crittenden has a new column that is sure to spark considerable dbate. In a column titled “Estimating Our National Intelligence” he argues that there are some fundamental misunderstandings about intelligence, how it is used and how it is released.
It’s a long piece that MUST be read in full so we’ll only give a few excerpts here:
The events of the last few days have created some misunderstandings regarding U.S. intelligence in the War on Terrorism, its appropriate uses and interpretation, and the role of politicians and the press in that process.
It started over the weekend when the New York Times, based on fragmentary information leaked by unnamed sources, reported that U.S. intelligence agencies have agreed that the Iraq war is fueling global jihad.The Associated Press amplified that the next day in a story that devoted its first 10 inches or so to Democrats bashing the Bush administration and calling for a pullout in Iraq, while burying the suggestions of Republicans and administration officials that there might be other things in the report worth noting.
Throughout his piece, he goes into detail; it isn’t just a rant. A bit more:
Coverage of the issue has not improved much since, despite the release of the National Intelligence Estimate’s “key judgments.”The document is worth close scrutiny. But before we get to that, here are a couple of you might want to bear in mind:
1.In time of war, the nation’s classified intelligence analysis of the enemy’s capabilities is none of our, the public’s, business. It is not the New York Times’ business. It is the business of those who are prosecuting this war. They use it to determine strategy and tactics for defeating that enemy.
2. It is, however, the business of a select few in Congress. For the purpose of oversight. Not for the purpose of scoring cheap political points.
Crittenden then looks at the NIE, quotes from it and gives you some of his analysis. His conclusion at the end:
It is an unemotional look at our enemy’s strengths and weaknesses, five years into a war it suggests will last at least another five years — which I would suggest is overly optimistic. While superficially useful to understanding where we are, as a snapshot taken mid-war, the NIE lacks some historical depth. It does not talk about whether allowing Saddam Hussein to remain in power in Iraq would have been better or worse for global jihad. It does not talk about the decades-long rise of global jihad, the spread and strengthening that was underway long before the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. It is not the NIE’s job to do that. Unfortunately, this silence allows people who prefer to think of Saddam as a benign dictator, and George Bush and the Iraq war as the primary impetus of jihad, to postulate that this document supports their views.
The document makes no judgment about whether we are winning or losing War on Terrorism, and does not dwell on the historical fact that, five years after the Sept. 11 attacks, al-Qaeda’s efforts at follow-on thus far have been thwarted.
But there is nothing particularly “bleak” about the estimate of our nations’ top intelligence analysts. Not unless you are one of those people who would prefer to remain under the covers rather than face the business at hand, this war that has been forced on us by people who want to destroy our way of life. And mid-war, I believe we can estimate that is not a particularly intelligent approach.
Read the whole piece…and see if you agree.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.