A Tale of Two Failures: Intelligence Failure and the Failure of the Press

May 9, 2008

Overview and Reminders

Remember, final exam distributed next week in class, research papers due too!

In lieu of a brief quiz, evaluations! Plowing ahead…

Not all were asleep at the wheel…

Walter Pincus, Washington Post, though his key story on WMD gets buried on A-17

Landay and Strobel: Knight Ridder newspapers

Seymour Hersh at the New Yorker Mark Danner and Michael Massing at the

New York Review of Books

Why the media failed…(Kamiya)

Psychological, institutional, ideological Psychological causes sound familiar:

“…the subtle, internalized, often unconscious way that the media conforms and defers to certain sacrosanct values and ideals…”

Institutional causes for failure Kamiya: “…the decline of newspapers, the rise

of infotainment, and media owners’ insistence on delivering high returns to their shareholders have diminished resources and led to a bottom-line fixation unconducive to aggressive reporting…It is harder to monitor the centers of power when you work for a gigantic corporation that is itself at the bull’s eye of power.”

The Faustian trade-off of “access” journalism (Judith Miller and the Chalabi disaster)

Ideological causes…

Made possible by an embarrassing lack of knowledge about the Middle East

An unexamined assumption that the interests of Israel are with those of the identical to those of the United States…the press trades in an extremely narrow range of opinion in regards to Israel, almost always right or right-center

Kamiya (and Michael Kinsley, also of Slate) argue this is the elephant in the room, no one says anything because they don’t want it to be treated like crude anti-Semitic slur

Bonus cause: An overmatched press Kamiya: “The mainstream media,

especially in its current enfeebled form, is simply not equipped with a regime as secretive, manipulative, vengeful and, not to put too fine a point on it, malignant as the present one. Watching the mainstream press try to contend with the Bush-Cheney gang is like watching the Polish cavalry galloping up in 1939 as the Wermacht tanks approach.”

Failures of US intelligence

The way it is supposed to work: intelligence agencies bring information about issues to policy makers who then determine which of a number of approaches are most likely to advance the interests of the nation…good intelligence allows policy makers to choose the best policy

What were the failures of intelligence… Evidence is NOT strong that the Bush

administration directly manipulated intelligence to promote the war in Iraq…

Evidence does suggest and reports have called CIA’s processes were “catastrophically flawed”

2004 Senate Report (Republicans in charge!) cites mistakes in nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, as well as specific efforts to obtain WMD ingredients

Senate Report and Groupthink

Irving Janis conceived Groupthink suggests that groups, without

precautions, tend toward self reinforcing delusions of unanimity, morality, and correctness. Dissenters are marginalized and most join the bandwagon to support the groups’ findings.

Prevented by active promotion of devil’s advocate, of leaders not tipping their hand in advance, bringing in respected outside authorities. In each case Bush does the opposite!

Additional causes of intelligence failures Dual intelligence operations, CIA and

defense (Bush’s War) The powerful influence of administration

expectations on intelligence findings The huge over-reliance of agencies on

defectors telling them what they wanted to hear, discounting stories from those who they did not (This explains Judith Miller as well!)

Special Sources for this lecture

Gary Kamiya, “Why the media failed,” Salon.com, April 10, 2007

Michael Massing, “Now they tell us,” New York Review of Books, January 29, 2004

Michael Massing, “Unfit to Print?” New York Review of Books, June 24, 2004