Feith and Reason, pt. 3 - Subversion by leak has become standard operating procedure at the CIA and elsewhere. It might be easier for the intelligence establishment to produce information that is only tangentially related to the interests of the executive branch simply because its more readily available, or represents more of the consensus among analysts. But easily derived intelligence is no substitute for accurate, actionable intelligence in meeting the needs of policymakers. Nor does the judgment of unelected, unaccountable analysts trump that of those who are elected and sworn to defend the United States and uphold its Constitution

From his previously referenced Foreign Affairs essay, former CIA agent Paul Pillar recommends steps to repair the relationship between policymaking and intelligence gathering. In particular, he proposes that the intelligence community be allowed to widen its constituent base beyond the executive branch in order to "reflect the fact that influence and relevance flow not just from face time in the Oval Office, but also from credibility with Congress and, most of all, with the American public." The readily apparent question that Pillar leaves unanswered is why this wouldnt just be a means of institutionalizing and legitimizing damaging leaks. (If the executive branch doesn't appreciate your "artwork," show it to Congress.) And by expanding their relationship with Congress, the intelligence community would simply create more customers for it to cater to, as well as more "politicizers" to be appeased. If the CIA cannot withstand the subtle influence of the executive branch, how will it resist the direct influence of an overbearing legislature - teeming with the likes of Senators Levin and Jay Rockerfeller - that also has budget authority.

Reasonable observers of the conduct of the CIA in recent times can only conclude that the agency's priorities have shifted from the defense of the United States and its interests to the defense of its own prerogatives and agendas. This shift would account for the reasoning expressed in Mr. Pillar's article, and also provides insight into the actions of fired CIA officer Mary McCarthy in leaking classified information on "secret" prisons used to house al-Qaeda detainees to the Washington Post. (Public records confirm that Ms. McCarthy gave $2,000 to John Kerrys Presidential campaign.) It explains former CIA analyst Michael Scheuer's "anonymous" publication of Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror, a blistering critique of President Bush's handling of the War on Terror. It also answers the question of why retired CIA officer Raymond McGovern would heckle Donald Rumsfeld during a speech on May 4, 2006.

And while these stalwarts were laboring in the dark recesses of Langley, the CIA was unable to foresee either the imminent fall of the Soviet Union, or the gathering threat of al-Qaeda. Nor could it preempt the April 1983 Embassy bombing in Beirut, the October 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, the attack on the World Trade Center in February of 1993, the suicide attack on the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia in June of 1996, the bombings of American Embassies in the East African cities of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and Nairobi, Kenya in 1998, the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000 or the deadly attacks of September 11, 2001, all of which would seem to fall under the agency's purview.

Unfortunately, none of the copious failings of America's once formidable intelligence apparatus can be remedied by any ill-conceived bureaucratic shuffling of titles and boxes on an organizational chart. The urgent need is for a real increase in the ability of our operatives to penetrate the inner workings of al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah and Abu Sayyaf. As Paul Pillar's article makes abundantly clear, the first step towards increasing the effectiveness of America's intelligence infrastructure (and perhaps reconfiguring the relationship between the White House and the intelligence community), is to recruit vertebrates for all future openings within the ranks of CIA analysts.

Snakes, chickens, jackasses or any other species with a spinal column will do better than the protozoa that presently infest America's intelligence agencies. And given the attitudes of current intelligence officers, as best exemplified by Mr. Pillar's comments, bias seems to sway the CIA in every direction except that which leads to the best defense of the American homeland. For their part, policymakers must accept and anticipate bias when evaluating any intelligence, be it the analyst's bias or their own. Surely it was such a realization that provided reason enough for Douglas Feith and his cohorts to question and evaluate the intelligence that they received from the intelligence community's fetid petri dish.

Feith and Reason, pt. 2 - As we turn our attention to the conduct of Sen. Carl Levin (or as he was described in a Wall Street Journal editorial, "Senator Ahab") as it regards his incessant investigations of pre-Iraq War intelligence, we get to ask ourselves how many more times must one misguided theory be disproved before it falls out of favor. Above and beyond the findings of the previously discussed Senate Select Intelligence Committee Report or the Robb-Silberman Report on WMD Intelligence, a recently published investigation on the handling of prewar intelligence conducted by the Pentagon's Inspector General also absolves senior officials - to include former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Douglas J. Feith - of any "illegal or unauthorized" activity in regards to production or dissemination of intelligence estimates.

Of course, Sen. Levin is hardly one to let the facts get in the way of a good story. As much was noted by the Journal.

But instead of moving on to more important things, Mr. Levin is still chasing his great white whale. He's grabbed on to an odd bit of editorializing by the Inspector General that Mr. Feith "was inappropriately performing Intelligence Activities...that should be performed by the Intelligence Community."

Mr. Levin's line of reasoning seems to be that policymakers like Mr. Feith are to be mere consumers of the product of the intelligence community, and should not challenge its assumptions, which themselves are usually the product of "lowest common denominator judgments - or group-think." This should sound familiar, as it is exactly the reasoning espoused by Paul R. Pillar, the former CIA official who coordinated U.S. intelligence efforts in the Middle East. In an article printed in the March/April 2006 issue of Foreign Affairs, Mr. Pillar attempted to breathe life into the oft-repeated (and by now, tiresome) charge of presidential interference with and dissembling about intelligence gathering efforts.

In his essay, Mr. Pillar attempts to make the case that the relationship between policymakers and the intelligence community has been damaged by the Bush administration’s supposed obsession with finding evidence of a link between Iraq and al-Qaeda in order to justify military action against the regime of Saddam Hussein. He concedes (but only begrudgingly) that prewar intelligence was flawed and that the Bush administration’s understanding of the threat posed by Iraq’s weapons programs "was shared by the Clinton administration, congressional Democrats, and most other Western governments and intelligence services," but counters that "even with its flaws, it was not what led to the war." Mr. Pillar suggests that the administration used prewar intelligence to justify a decision that had already been reached, leaving policy analysts "to register varying degrees of private protest," and describes how the Bush administration influenced the development of intelligence regarding war with Iraq.

But the principal way that the intelligence community’s work on Iraq was politicized concerned the specific questions to which the community devoted its energies. As any competent pollster can attest, how a question is framed helps determine the answer. In the case of Iraq, there was also the matter of sheer quantity of output – not just what the intelligence community said, but how many times it said it. On any given subject, the intelligence community faces what is in effect a field of rocks, and it lacks the resources to turn over every one to see what threats to national security may lurk underneath. In an unpoliticized environment, intelligence officers decide which rocks to turn over based on past patterns and their own judgments. But when policymakers repeatedly urge the intelligence community to turn over only certain rocks, the process producing a body of reporting and analysis that, thanks to quantity and emphasis, leaves the impression that what lies under those rocks is a bigger part of the problem than it really is.

Mr. Pillar acknowledges that the issue of "politicization" of intelligence gathering is ground that has been covered by the both the Senate Select Committee and the Robb-Silberman Commission, but tries to get around their conclusions by suggesting that these investigations "would have caught only the crudest attempts at politicization." (I find it interesting that Mr. Pillar does not address why a genuinely distressed CIA officer would not seize upon one of these investigations as an opportunity to register their concerns.)

Throughout his essay, Mr. Pillar seems to be indicting the Bush administration for exercising its prerogatives to ask for what it needs and to ignore or reject the work product of intelligence gatherers. This line of thinking becomes more plausible in light of another statement made by Pillar.

It was clear that the Bush administration would frown on or ignore analysts that called into question a decision to go to war and welcome analysts that supported such a decision. Intelligence analysts – for who attention, especially favorable attention, from policymakers is a measure of success – felt a strong wind consistently blowing in one direction. The desire to bend with such a wind is natural and strong, even if unconscious.

The light that this remark sheds on the motivations of analysts is hardly flattering. It makes the entire intelligence community sound like a group of kindergarteners who want their "artwork" to end up on the wall in their classroom or on their parent's refrigerator. It also shatters the illusion that intelligence analysts are unbiased, almost Solomonic figures. In this light, they appear to be more political animals than professional analysts.

Perhaps it is just as well that we are disabused of such notions, no matter how inadvertent it was that Pillar did so. The idea that America’s intelligence apparatus is made up of all-seeing, all-knowing, completely agenda-free professionals was a tough sell even before September 11, 2001. Decades of neglect on the part of Congressional Democrats rendered the intelligence agencies useless, but benign. The intelligence community's current attempts to play political catch-up in the face of "strong winds" after 9/11 have turned it into a malignancy, riddled with careerists who are not merely content with providing useful intelligence, but would rather shape policy itself (but only in such a way as to avoid direct accountability.) By these efforts, the intelligence community has shown itself to be a greater danger to our Republic than George Bush ever will be, as they undermine our representative government by attempting to thwart the stated will of the majority of Americans as expressed through their election of President Bush.

More to come...

The Last Civil Rights Movement, pt. 4 - The original sin of America's educational apartheid was not that it forced black children to go to school with other blacks. It was more fundamentally a sin of depriving some children the right attend a school that best met their educational needs and aspirations; most black schools were woefully equipped and poorly staffed relative to white schools. The Civil Rights Movement of that era was faced with two imperfect choices: either to encourage whites to fund majority-white and majority-black schools equally or to open white public schools to black students. Perhaps necessarily as a function of expedience, the conversation about educational options for black students became a discussion about desegregation of schools, as opposed to an argument for school choice more generally. (In retrospect, history seems to have confirmed the wisdom of the former.)

In any event, today's school voucher discussion naturally picks up where efforts at school desegregation left off. As it is, increasing per-pupil spending in most urban school districts would simply reinforce the sclerotic bureaucracy that has stifled all efforts at reform thus far. So it brings great pleasure to note that last week, legislature of Utah passed the most sweeping voucher plan of any state. According to the Salt Lake Tribune, Utah will be the first state to grant "public education vouchers to families in all income brackets throughout the state," with the article going on to note, "programs in a handful of other states are limited to low-income students, city school districts or failing schools."

To underscore the need for some sort of education reform in Utah and nationally, one need only look at NAEP scores for Utah in comparison to the national average. In 2005, the average 4th-grade NAEP reading score for white children in Utah was 225.90, as compared with a 227.64 average score nationwide. Similarly, for Utah's Hispanic 4th-graders, the average score was 198.69 vs. 201.34 nationally. (Comparisons for African American 4th-graders are unavailable, as Utah did not meet the reporting standards for black students.)

As is to be expected, the opponents of school choice arrayed themselves against the legislation. (Of course, this does not surprise, as Democrats have recognized neither a child's right to life, nor a child's right to learn.)

"This is not about the children," said Sen. Gene Davis, D-Salt Lake City. "We've got it covered up real nice making it seem like it is. But the reality is, it's about taking tax dollars and giving them to private industry."

Sen. Patricia Jones, D-Salt Lake City, objected because the program could cost more than $40 million a year by the time it's fully implemented, according to the Legislative Fiscal Analyst's Office. It will take $9.3 million from general funds this year, and $12.4 million next year.

For the record, noted in the article, voucher supporters expect that this bill will actually increase overall education spending, as "parents of voucher students add money to state education funding when they make up tuition differences." Fortunately, HB148 passed the Utah Senate handily, with a 19-10 majority, although it squeaked through the House by a vote of 38-37. Gov. Jon Huntsman, Jr. has indicated his inclination to sign the legislation into law fairly quickly, commenting that "it's hard to argue that it is deleterious to education long term." But it will surely have a negative effect on Utah's educational establishment. So as was noted in the February 11, 2007 Tribune, we can expect constitutional challenges from parents represented by organizations such as the ACLU.

Feith and Reason - There seems to be no more impenetrable fortress of imaginary thinking than that occupied by those who have convinced themselves that President Bush manipulated intelligence or pressured intelligence agencies to do so in order to "lie" America into war against Iraq. I suppose we should not be surprised that the idea maintains its currency; anything said often enough and with sufficient fervor will begin to take on a life of its own in the current political climate. It’s all the more disturbing when craven Democrat leaders parrot the charge, as did Senator Ted Kennedy during a January 14, 2004 speech in Washington D.C.

The advocates of war in Iraq desperately sought to make the case that Saddam was linked to 9/11 and Al Qaeda, and that he was on the verge of acquiring a nuclear capability. They created an Office of Special Projects in the Pentagon to analyze the intelligence for war. They bypassed the traditional screening process and put pressure on intelligence officers to produce the desired intelligence and analysis.

Similarly, Al Gore repeated the hackneyed charge in a January 16, 2006 speech jointly sponsored by the Liberty Coalition and the American Constitution Society. During his MLK Day remarks, he opined that "CIA analysts who strongly disagreed with the White House… found themselves under pressure at work and became fearful of losing promotions and salary increases."

I suppose that these efforts on the part of elected Democrats should not surprise, as they represent the only way for the Pelosis, Clintons and Kerrys of the Congress to appear credible to both the fringe left that has become the Democratic base and to the American public in general. Indeed, the only story that they can tell with a straight face is that they were lied to by the President.

In their version of events, George Bush manipulated, or pressured others to manipulate, intelligence that was used to justify the invasion of Iraq. So now, we have Bush hatred and political expediency commingling to bring about our present spectacle. Fortunately - the revisionist impulses of progressives notwithstanding - we have the results of several independent investigations to insure that our memories comport themselves with the historical record. To wit:

- The July 2004 Senate Intelligence Committee Report, which stated that the committee, "did not find any evidence that Administration officials attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgments related to Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction."

- The March 2005 Robb-Silberman Report on WMD Intelligence which found, "no evidence of political pressure to influence the Intelligence Community’s pre-war assessments of Iraq’s weapons programs" and went on to say, "We conclude that it was the paucity of intelligence and poor analytical tradecraft, rather than political pressure, that produced the inaccurate pre-war intelligence assessments."

Ah yes, what of the sad and sorry "intelligence community." Before the start of the Iraq War, it was but an emasculated shadow of what it should have been, thanks in no small measure to many of the same Democratic congressmen and liberal special interest groups who claimed that intelligence was manipulated to justify the Iraq War.†

But the better part of our opprobrium is best reserved for the politicians who continue to say anything on any given day to pander to their base on the matter of prewar intelligence. And so I continue to reserve the fullest measure of my disdain for Sen. Carl Levin, who remains the lone holdout in the Senate who still caries a torch for this thoroughly discredited belief.

More to come...

† Nothing more dramatically illustrates the neutered status of the America’s intelligence operations than the controversy surrounding "Able Danger", a secret military intelligence unit. In August of 2005, two veteran intelligence officers, Colonel Anthony Schaffer and Navy Captain Scott J. Phillpott revealed that Able Danger identified Mohamed Atta and three of the other 9/11 hijackers by mid-2000, but were prevented from providing this information to the FBI by Pentagon lawyers. In a subsequent Pentagon probe, Defense Department officials acknowledged locating "three more people who recall seeing an intelligence briefing slide that identified the ring leader of the 9/11 attacks a year before the hijackings and terrorist strikes." Although this information was presented to the 9/11 Commission (as Captain Phillpott claims to have briefed the commission in July of 2004), the Commission’s final report, released on July 22, 2004, concluded that "American intelligence agencies were unaware of Mr. Atta until the day of the attacks."

A Paucity of Hope, pt. 2 - Over the weekend, at least two events took place that may signify a modicum of hope for African Americans; as noted elsewhere, hope is in short supply in too many parts of today's black community. The announcement of Sen. Barack Obama's candidacy for President, along with the conduct of Tavis Smiley's State of the Black Union 2007, may well provide rays of inspiration to a much-benighted people.

The need for inspiration among blacks is manifest. Understandably, those who would presume to provide assistance to any group in a such a plight might seek to examine the problems from every vantage. Such appears to be the motivation behind the Black Youth Project, a research effort conducted under the auspices of the University of Chicago's Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture, which aims to study the attitudes, actions and decision-making of African American young people. To that end, the Black Youth Project recently published a summary of its research into the attitudes and behavior of young black Americans.

In a press release announcing the study's availability, lead study author and U of C Professor Cathy J. Cohen described the goal of the research as that of "provid[ing] data that will help build effective policies that can significantly improve the lives and prospects of young black people." By oversampling blacks and Hispanics among the 1,590 respondents, the study would seem to be able to do just that. But almost from the outset, the problems with the research become evident. After reading the summary, it becomes clear that this is a "media study," designed for consumption of those who are wholly unconcerned with the methodology and validity of research. Indeed, it is chock full of "infobits" suitable for insertion into a preordained media narrative.

The main flaw in this study is methodological. The study attempts to divine young people's perceptions on subjects as varied as rap music, self-esteem, political participation, religion and health, gender and sexual orientation issues, racial attitudes and sexuality. But in as much as any of these questions could serve as a stand-alone research question, it is problematic that the study questionnaire only asks participants directly about these subjects without validating their responses by asking a slightly varied follow-up question later in the survey. By attempting to cover too many subjects with only 240 questions in total, the research can at best only capture the feelings of the subjects - however fleeting and labile they may be - as opposed their attitudes, which are more likely to be consistent, longstanding and deeply held.

So there is no surprise that many of the study's findings are contradictory. For example, while 79 percent of black youth believe that "police discriminate much more against Black youth than they do against White youth," less than 20 percent of Black youth state that they themselves were "very often or often" discriminated against, and 48 percent have been "rarely or never" discriminated against based on race. Similarly, while the study reports that 79 percent of Black youth believe that they can "make a difference by participating in politics," only 2 percent have participated in a boycott, and only small percentages of young African Americans have signed petitions or hosted a political blog.

Sadly, there is also no surprise that much of the narrative of the summary speaks to "conclusions" that are not supported by the study results. The report introduces the concept of buycotting - buying a product because the consumer likes the social or political values of the manufacturer - as a means of political expression. In any event, there is no evidence from the report to suggest that this is anything other than teenage consumerism disguised as activism.

In like fashion, the summary avers that as "marginalized and racialized youth," young African Americans "find themselves at the center of many national political struggles and are, therefore, politicized at a much earlier age than more privileged youth." That this is a specimen of "bass-ackwards" logic is so patent as to be beyond debate; in as much as these young people are "marginalized" at all, it is precisely because they are not political actors (unless promiscuity, violence and nihilism are now to be construed as political acts.)

This "research" brings two underacknowledged facts into focus. First, by way of an inexact metaphor, even as the Civil Rights Movement ferried African Americans to within mere feet of the shore of racial progress, some of the passengers left the boat and began to swim back towards the deep waters from which they were rescued. They were ultimately set upon by the sharks of random violence, drug abuse and promiscuity. Sadly, far too few set about to take the first steps from the ark of safety to the land of opportunity. As we consider the attitudes and opinions of black youth, we should endeavor to uncover the motivations for the counterproductive behaviors that confound well-intentioned efforts to ameliorate their plight.

Just as important, we must appreciate that the Black Youth Project is of a piece with other efforts on the part of the leftist academy to disparage America and its mainstream beliefs. At this juncture, it is worthwhile to note that no other nation has done more to reconcile the tenets elaborated in its enabling documents with its de facto behaviors as it regards race relations. Surely, there is much more that remains to be done on the part of both whites and blacks, but it would not be unseemly to acknowledge the progress that has been made, even as we aspire to a greater common good.

See How She Runs - In her continued effort to run a mistake-free (make that a mistake acknowledgment-free) run for the White House, Sen. Hillary Clinton again dodged a direct question about her vote to support President Bush in launching the Iraq War. While at a highly-staged, invitation-only event over the weekend, Hillary was asked by a New Hampshire voter about whether her initial support of the war was a mistake. In her response, she retreated to her typical Clintonspeak, as reported by NY1 News.

To his credit, the attendee (identified by the New York Times as Roger Tilton of Nashua) was forthright in his interrogatory in as much as he asked her, "I want to know if right here and right now, once and for all, without nuance, can you say that the war authorization vote was a mistake." Her response was straight from the well-worn Clinton playbook.

Knowing what I know now, I would never have voted for it. But I also – and obviously you have to weigh everything as you make your decision – I have taken responsibility for my vote. The mistakes were made by this president.

So even as Hillary continues her Iraq War bob-and-weave, new challengers with stronger antiwar bona fides make their entrance into the political arena. And as progressives demand more blood oaths of fealty from those who would win Democrat primaries, Hillary's current position becomes less and less tenable, even as she attempts to sidestep an antiwar avalanche from the Left. As much has been noted in an editorial from last Thursday's Wall Street Journal.

All politicians change their minds about something at some point, but what's troubling about Mrs. Clinton's record on Iraq is that it tends to follow, rather than lead, public opinion. When the war was first debated, and she couldn't easily walk away from her husband's record against Saddam, she was a solid, even eloquent, hawk. Then for a time she laid low and avoided the antiwar excesses of John Kerry and others.

But now that the war has proven to be difficult, and her fellow Democrats are outflanking her on the antiwar left, she is steadily, even rapidly, moving in their direction. So in the space of merely 14 months and as the Presidential campaign begins in earnest, Mrs. Clinton has gone from advocating a new plan to "win" the Iraq war, with "honor," to vocally opposing President Bush's new strategy to try to do precisely that. And, oh, yes, she now wants the "surge" to be in Afghanistan instead of Iraq.

In as much as the editorial notes that "what she really believes, and how firmly she'll stick to it, deserves to be debated," Sen. Clinton does indeed owe it to the American people to be candid about her feelings on the Iraq War, as well as how she reconciles her past support of the war with her her current position(s). As long as Hillary refuses to resolve the tension between her disparate statements, she will be vulnerable to the nascent campaign of Sen. Barack Obama. More importantly, by continuing to retreat from her previous support without acknowledging some sort of mistake, she will confirm her unsuitability to be President and Commander-in-Chief.

"Just don't call it a divorce!", pt. 3 - As noted in today's NYT, the Presiding Bishop of the U. S. Episcopal Church (ECUSA), Dr. Katharine Jefferts Schori will be facing a "hostile reception" as she meets her international counterparts in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania this week. As noted elsewhere, the internecine wrangling within the Church over (among other things) the ordination of openly gay clergy represents a small but growing problem both within and outside the church, as it affects its standing within much of the Anglican Communion. For her part, Dr. Schori proposes that those within the ECUSA who are displeased with the "leftward drift" of the church "represent a small percentage of the whole, but they are quite loud."

Of course, amongst the other 37 provinces of the greater Anglican Communion, the problems facing the ECUSA may take on greater significance than Dr. Schori is willing to let on.

In the global picture, however, those unhappy with the Americans are a significant bloc, and some are ready to cut off the American branch of the Anglican Communion. Conservatives were emboldened recently when an influential bishop, N. T. Wright of Durham, England, said in an interview, "Even if it means a bit of pruning, the plant will be healthier for it."

Indeed, several ECUSA churches have recently seceded from the home church, some looking to Nigerian Archbishop Peter Akinola for doctrinal supervision, as Rev. Akinola has had some success in forming a rival network of conservative Episcopal churches.

The fact that an African clergyman has found American churches willing to accede to his spiritual guidance does not entirely surprise, as among most Christian denominations, the United States is seen as the most fertile ground for missionary work. What might surprise is the attitude of some mainline Protestant clergy when they consider the theological contributions of their co-religionists in South America and Africa. According to an opinion piece in the December 1, 2006 Wall Street Journal, during a November visit to Harvard, "the well-known liberal priest" Andrew Greeley spoke on the changing demographics of Catholicism, as much of the church's growth is coming from the developing world. Father Greeley proposed that "[w]e will depend on them for vitality, but they will continue to depend on us for ideas."

The Journal piece went on to note that this level of condescension is hardly singular to Father Greeley.

Timothy Shah, a senior fellow in religion and world affairs at the Pew Forum, believes that Father Greeley's attitude is "fairly widespread" among academics and theologians in Europe and North America... He cites the recent controversy within the Episcopal Church over the issue of homosexuality. When African primates declared at the church's 1998 conference that homosexual practice is "incompatible with Scripture," the American bishop John Shelby Spong, of Newark, N.J., suggested that African Christianity is backward: "They have yet to face the intellectual revolution of Copernicus and Einstein that we've had to face in the developing world."

Yet again the Left, particularly the Christian Left, demonstrates itself to be the wellspring of racist condescension and stereotyping. Whatever befalls the ECUSA in the weeks and months ahead, Dr. Schori will get a full dose of the reasoning of her African co-primates in a matter of days. We may yet find out who will depend upon whom for new ideas about an old faith.