Beaten Guard Dogs Don’t Bark

I’m just getting around to making some posts, so the articles are a little dated.

Wall St. Journal op-ed on the purpose of “enhanced” interrogations by a former director of NSA and CIA.  The key points:

The release of these opinions was unnecessary as a legal matter, and is unsound as a matter of policy. Its effect will be to invite the kind of institutional timidity and fear of recrimination that weakened intelligence gathering in the past, and that we came sorely to regret on Sept. 11, 2001…

Which brings us to the next of the justifications for disclosing and thus abandoning these measures: that they don’t work anyway, and that those who are subjected to them will simply make up information in order to end their ordeal…  But confessions aren’t the point. Intelligence is. Interrogation is conducted by using such obvious approaches as asking questions whose correct answers are already known and only when truthful information is provided proceeding to what may not be known. Moreover, intelligence can be verified, correlated and used to get information from other detainees, and has been; none of this information is used in isolation…

Of the thousands of unlawful combatants captured by the U.S., fewer than 100 were detained and questioned in the CIA program. Of those, fewer than one-third were subjected to any of the techniques discussed in these opinions. As already disclosed by Director Hayden, as late as 2006, even with the growing success of other intelligence tools, fully half of the government’s knowledge about the structure and activities of al Qaeda came from those interrogations…

Politicians pressure the intelligence community to push to the legal limit, and then cast accusations when aggressiveness goes out of style, thereby encouraging risk aversion, and then, as occurred in the wake of 9/11, criticizing the intelligence community for feckless timidity.

The key finding in the aftermath of 9/11 was that the law enforcement side and the intelligence side of the national security community did not “share information.”  They, of course, did not share information because such practices had essentially been institutionalized, albeit informally, in the wake of the Church and Pike Commissions.  [During the Carter Administration, the country began learning of some of the tactics undertaken by the FBI during the tenure of J. Edgar Hoover (COINTELPRO, etc.).  A Democratic Congress was concerned that the intelligence people would "spy" on Americans that it deemed dangerous (white supremacist groups, anarchists, far Left-wing groups) and share it with the law-enforcement people, who would then round up "innocent" Americans for simply expressing their constitutional rights.  Thus, the "wall" between intelligence and law-enforcement was erected in order to protect groups like the KKK, the Black Panthers and Weather Underground.]

The point is that the airing of the entire “torture” discussion outside the administration has the same effect as the Church and Pike Commissions in the 1970s.   By publicly chastising and threatening legal action against it, the Intelligence Community learns timidity.  It learns to keep its head down and honor the house-line of the bureaucracy, the primary issue that led to the Intelligence Community’s failure to anticipate 9/11 despite, as George Tenet said, the “light was blinking red.”

These things matter.  Ideas have consequences.  I don’t think the Carter and Obama Administrations were/are intentionally trying to hurt the country, but I do think they were/are clueless enough where their actions do just that.  As stated, in paraphrase, at the end of the book “Broken”:  If you kick a guard dog every time it barks, it learns to not bark.  The worst type of intelligence community is one that doesn’t bark.