Times Magazine failure of intelligence?
The New York Times Magazine had to have closed out its cover story for yesterday well before the stories about torture in Abu Ghraib prison broke. So chalk one up to its editors' prescience for running Michael Ignatieff's "Lesser Evils," which all but predicts the scandal:
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Torture, our founding fathers said, was the vice of tyrannies and its absolute exclusion the mark of free government. At the same time, keeping torture, or at least what used to be called "the third degree," from creeping back into our police squad rooms at home has required constant vigilance by D.A.'s and honest cops. Now it may be creeping into our war on terror. There is some evidence that the United States has handed key suspects over to Middle Eastern governments for torture. In the metal containers stacked up behind rings of razor wire on Bagram air base in Afghanistan, beatings are reportedly routine, and at least two suspects have died during secret interrogations. It is possible that similar physical methods have been used against detainees from the Hussein regime at Baghdad airport. |
It's a smart piece, overall, but I do have one bone to pick: In his discussion of intelligence, Ignatieff writes, "The United States appears, for example, to have had almost no one on the ground in Iraq after 1998, hence the catastrophic misjudgment by U.S. intelligence about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction."
Now, he's obviously right that U.S. intelligence could have used some agents "on the ground" in Iraq after 1998. But surely everything we've learned about the interplay between the Bush administration and its intelligence operation in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq -- from the creation of the Wolfowitz/Perle skunkworks to the stovepiping of unvetted reports -- has demonstrated that the U.S. intelligence rank-and-file basically got it right before the war: They told the Bush administration that there really was no conclusive evidence supporting either the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq or the much-hunted link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida.
The problem wasn't with the intelligence. The problem was with the Bush administration. It didn't like the intelligence it got. (Maybe it didn't believe the intelligence it got, since it was listening to "friends" like Ahmed Chalabi.) So it ordered up some new intelligence.
Let's not allow the Bush administration's rewriting of this important bit of history to stand. The fiasco of the missing WMDs was not primarily a failure of intelligence; it was a failure of presidential management and leadership. Such failures are all too common in an administration that stubbornly -- even "catastrophically" -- refuses to recalibrate its preconceptions when they get bruised by reality.
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