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You are here: Home / Politics / Media / Why The Post Intelligence Series Flopped

Why The Post Intelligence Series Flopped

by @heymistermix.com|  July 31, 20109:03 am| 37 Comments

This post is in: Media

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Richard Posner has some good insights:

The report is, in fact, a disappointment. It is descriptive rather than analytic, and the description is based entirely on two types of data, neither of which contributes to an understanding of the nature and problems of the nation’s intelligence system. The two types are statistics indicating the size and organizational complexity of national security intelligence, and expressions of exasperation at that size and complexity by former or current insiders.

The statistics are not broken down by each of the principal domains of national security intelligence, and so the reader is given no sense of the actual structure of the intelligence system. […]

Merely counting the number of people, parking spaces, square feet of building space, and other countables lovingly recited in the Post‘s report conveys no useful information and will impress only naïve readers who have somehow failed to realize that the U.S. government and its major components are huge. […]

I don’t agree with much of what Posner writes in general, but his basic point that numbers without context are meaningless is well taken here. It’s easy to charge “apathy” on the part of readers, but if they’re supposed to care, they need context to know why they should care.

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37Comments

  1. 1.

    Svensker

    July 31, 2010 at 9:16 am

    Three important stories in the last few weeks — Post’s Intelligence series, the Wikileaks story, and the bit about Netanyahu crowing about blowing up Oslo while bitch-slapping Clinton and the U.S. — the latter almost not covered at all, the others given minimal exposure considering the topic and who was covering it.

    I don’t think anyone really cares anymore. The Goopers, of course, love them some empire, but are more focused on proving “the left” is racist et fucking cetera; and the Dems/liberals are neutered by having Obama in the WH — those of them that aren’t empire lovers, as well.

    Personally, I think this country is over, but maybe a few more hours sleep will make me less sour.

  2. 2.

    Emma

    July 31, 2010 at 9:27 am

    Perhaps I am getting hopelessly cynical, but I think that’s a feature, not a bug. What they are doing is conveying the impression that the governments is huge, Huge, HUGE… and therefore it should be whittled down to size. Undercover of concern, they are carrying water for the “entitlement cuts and tax cuts” contingent. Their job is to trigger a sense of panic and disgust on the part of the public and allow the the conservatives move in.

    At the end of the day, we will have the same-size security apparatus with an extra mandate to spy on and act against “internal enemies” and people will be struggling so hard to survive that that they won’t have the energy to complain.

  3. 3.

    jwb

    July 31, 2010 at 9:29 am

    @Svensker: And how exactly has Obama been neutering the Dems/liberals? I don’t see him stopping the left from organizing; I just see a bunch of whiny activists who confuse writing opinion and backseat quarterbacking with doing the hard work of organizing.

  4. 4.

    SGEW

    July 31, 2010 at 9:32 am

    I don’t agree with much of what Posner writes in general . . .

    I hope you saw his 2009 TNR piece “How I Became a Keynesian,” in which he more or less abandons many of his previous economic beliefs. If you know who Prof. Richard “Law and Economics” Posner is, it’s a pretty amazing read.

  5. 5.

    General Stuck

    July 31, 2010 at 9:34 am

    @jwb: If he has neutered them, then they approve of it at 89 percent. Maybe the 11 percenters are neutered, that is their right, but it will be difficult increasing their numbers in that condition.

  6. 6.

    Svensker

    July 31, 2010 at 9:37 am

    @jwb:

    And how exactly has Obama been neutering the Dems/liberals?

    I don’t think Obama has neutered Dems. I think having “our guy” in office makes us act differently — we’re not as angry, not as activist, not as engaged as we were when Bush was still in office. I see it in myself (and I’m very angry with Obama about civil liberties and the wars) — under Bush I was making phone calls, signing petitions, volunteering, sending stuff to friends and family. With O in office, there’s a lot less feeling of urgency, even tho he’s been almost as bad as Bush in many cases and, in some, even worse.

    Speaking for myself, there’s the feeling of “this is as good as it’s going to get? oh well, why bother”.

  7. 7.

    matoko_chan

    July 31, 2010 at 9:55 am

    numbers without context are meaningless

    the context is classified.

  8. 8.

    jwb

    July 31, 2010 at 9:58 am

    @Svensker: “we’re not as angry, not as activist, not as engaged as we were when Bush was still in office.”

    I concur, but this is really our fault and not Obama’s, no? We’re really not getting out there, getting in his face and making him do the things we want.

  9. 9.

    srv

    July 31, 2010 at 10:09 am

    What’s meaningless IS the context. None of these organizations demonstrably provides any national security benefit.

    – Exactly how many terrorist attacks have been uncovered and stopped by these organizations? There are many claims, zero evidence.
    – Which organizations, exactly, stopped attacks?
    – Which organizations accurately assessed Saddam’s WMDs?

    There is no evidence, and their overseers are just as much in the dark as the rest of us. These are organizations that spent hundreds of billions, missed 9/11, and then blamed Jamie Gorelick.

  10. 10.

    liberal

    July 31, 2010 at 10:10 am

    @Emma:

    Perhaps I am getting hopelessly cynical, but I think that’s a feature, not a bug. What they are doing is conveying the impression that the governments is huge, Huge, HUGE… and therefore it should be whittled down to size.

    I respectfully disagree. I only skimmed the series, but (as a federal contractor myself, in a position that by any reasonable logic should be a federal employee position) the obvious message I gleaned was that there are inherently governmental functions being performed by private companies.

  11. 11.

    liberal

    July 31, 2010 at 10:12 am

    @srv:
    Completely agree, but that’s a different story. One that occurred to me reading stuff linked from antiwar.com this morning. “Jeez, if we just abandoned our empire, we wouldn’t have to spend money on this shite.”

    Not that spending money on it does any good even in the setting of our current foreign policy, of course.

  12. 12.

    liberal

    July 31, 2010 at 10:13 am

    Speaking of antiwar.com: “Obama Seeks Massive Expansion of Arms Exports: Presses Congress to Eliminate Regulations on Sales”

  13. 13.

    liberal

    July 31, 2010 at 10:16 am

    @jwb:

    I don’t see him stopping the left from organizing…

    Uh huh. So if “the left” (whatever that is) were to spend its time and money organizing against repellant aspects of Democratic governance, people here wouldn’t piss and moan about how it should be focusing on the Republicans instead?

    Right…

  14. 14.

    Allison W.

    July 31, 2010 at 10:37 am

    Uh huh. So if “the left” (whatever that is) were to spend its time and money organizing against repellant aspects of Democratic governance, people here wouldn’t piss and moan about how it should be focusing on the Republicans instead?

    Right…

    Uh, since when does “the left” care what anyone thinks? Anytime your peers are concerned with the way “the left” criticizes the president and what they choose to focus on, they just get dismissed and are labeled Obamabots. Suddenly we’re an obstacle that’s preventing you from organizing?

  15. 15.

    TheStone333

    July 31, 2010 at 10:37 am

    The context is a nation that is currently preparing itself for a decades-long plunge into entitlement cuts and the dismantling of the current social contract, in large part b/c we have spent a lot of dough paying many organizations to develop excessive redundancies in our national intelligence system.
    Another part of the context is that those pricey redundancies did absolutely nothing to prevent several recent near-misses by fairly incompetent terrorists. In fact, the reporting on those incidents would seem to indicate that the sprawling nature of the system was partly to blame. (also see: 9/11).
    If Judge Posner and others are looking for a more Yglesiesque approach to the problem, I am sure the data is available for them to construct their own analyses. However, the politically useful soundbyte that needs to come out of this really can be summed up as “we are spending too much money on this crap out of fear of being branded weak and alot of it is going to overpriced private firms that spend most of their revenue on lobbying to gin up further spending.” Anything above and beyond that is doomed to dissipate into the ether of the blogosphere.

  16. 16.

    Allison W.

    July 31, 2010 at 10:45 am

    @liberal:

    I’m always amazed at the difference between an original article and the article that provides the link to the original article.

  17. 17.

    jwb

    July 31, 2010 at 10:52 am

    @liberal: I didn’t say that the left needed to organize against Dem governance; I merely claimed that Obama wasn’t neutering the left (or anyone else) or stopping the left (or anyone else) from being politically active.

  18. 18.

    Emma

    July 31, 2010 at 10:53 am

    Liberal: Like Rachel Maddow says, I’m always willing to be talked down. But I’m not so sure that I want to give them the benefit of the doubt at this point.

  19. 19.

    Dr. Squid

    July 31, 2010 at 11:09 am

    his basic point that numbers without context are meaningless

    A: In this graph, this column represents 23% of the population. This column represents 28% of the population, and this column represents 43% of the population.

    B: Telling figures indeed.

  20. 20.

    Svensker

    July 31, 2010 at 11:28 am

    @jwb:

    I concur, but this is really our fault and not Obama’s, no?

    Don’t think it’s Obama’s fault at all.

  21. 21.

    ThatLeftTurnInABQ

    July 31, 2010 at 11:28 am

    @liberal:

    the obvious message I gleaned was that there are inherently governmental functions being performed by private companies.

    What’s good for America is good for General Motors Panopticon, and visa-versa.

  22. 22.

    roshan

    July 31, 2010 at 12:07 pm

    The Top Secret America project report is something of opposite in nature to the recent Wikileaks Afghan docs. The Post reporters likely went through official channels and what was available publicly to get most of it’s information. As anyone could have had guessed, it was sanitized to the nth degree. It’s like going into a Walmart and getting an inventory of the products they sell. It’s totally abstract in nature. Many of the photos, taken from a distance, in the report were of the facilities, that have sprung up to support this national security state. If anyone wants context (however wrong) they would most likely would have to hear the Alex Jones program. It wouldn’t have had matter a least bit if they hadn’t done this series at all.

  23. 23.

    KCinDC

    July 31, 2010 at 12:34 pm

    Reminds me of Republicans’ recent obsession with the number of pages in bills, and the number of words in the Constitution.

  24. 24.

    Corner Stone

    July 31, 2010 at 12:39 pm

    @jwb:

    We’re really not getting out there, getting in his face and making him do the things we want.

    I find this notion to be borderline insanity. How exactly would you make this President do anything? He has the perfect foil in an intransigent Congress.
    You going to organize a group that withholds funding from elections? Threaten to not vote? Because those are the only two things you have that politicians care about.
    And the overwhelming majority of Democrats aren’t going to do either of those things with a D in the WH.
    OFA is Obama for America. MoveOn has been rendered pathetically irrelevant. What else you got?

  25. 25.

    Turgid Jacobian

    July 31, 2010 at 12:48 pm

    @srv: to be fair, one of the big contentions is that “these organizations” has grown a lot since they missed 9/11. Not that I’m claiming that they’ve increased their performance.

  26. 26.

    DickSpudCouchPotatoDetective

    July 31, 2010 at 12:50 pm

    Which organizations accurately assessed Saddam’s WMDs?

    Exactly. And how did the organizations that didn’t, manage to misunderstand the threat in the face of rather obvious evidence which contradicted their wrong conclusions?

    For example, how did they manage to know where every barrel of oil in Iraq was going, who was buying it and for how much, and when and how it got delivered … but couldn’t keep track of the WMDs?

  27. 27.

    jwb

    July 31, 2010 at 1:39 pm

    @Corner Stone: How about organizing groups to make regular calls to congresscritters, write letters to the editor, rallies to draw attention to particular political causes, etc., etc., etc.—you know, all the normal things that activists do (and some leftist groups continue to do) in order to make a political movement visible. But I see very little of that going on these days. Other than the daily spam email which gets deleted unread, I’ve been contacted twice by OfA this year, three times by the ACLU, and not once by any other left-leaning organization. But I’ve read thousands upon thousands of bitchy blog posts by people calling themselves activists. I have nothing against bitchy blog posts, btw, which can be entertaining, enlightening and sometimes even motivating; but I don’t confuse them with activism.

    ETA: “OFA is Obama for America. MoveOn has been rendered pathetically irrelevant. What else you got?” We ain’t got nothing else, which is exactly my point. But I don’t blame Obama for the fact that leftist activist are completely ineffective. I blame leftist activists for that. OfA itself has been as ineffective as other leftist groups, so I guess you could argue that Obama has been a problem insofar as OfA has been taking resources from other leftist groups—if that’s indeed the case.

  28. 28.

    handsmile

    July 31, 2010 at 2:03 pm

    The Washington Post’s intelligence series “flopped” because of the Sherrod/Breitbart affair that broke on the very same day that the first part of the series was published.

    The three articles produced virtually no reverberations in a mainstream media environment clamoring with the pell-mell sequence of allegations/revelations/retractions (rinse, repeat) of that week’s dominant story. The leading politically-oriented blogs were likewise sucked into that vortex. By the series’ final installment on July 21, it had vanished from the broadcast networks and the daytime programming of CNN and MSNBC.

    Sadly, it is only through media repetition and reverberation that the nation’s attention span is snagged.

    Now comes Lord Posner to deliver his summary judgment on the report. “A disappointment,” he intones, much to the relief of the Village who reveres him as one of the Most Serious People. And certainly he should know because he’s written one book on the subject. Lord Posner, of course, has written one book on many subjects, empowering him to wield authority as topical expert. (Thus Dana Priest, one of the finest investigative reporters still working for a major metropolitan daily, is awarded the boon of being described as a “competent and experienced reporter.”)

    Posner’s dismissal of the report’s findings is predicated upon an exclusive focus on quantitative information. Pronouncing that Priest and William Arkin did little more than “lovingly” recite numerical data (“parking spaces, square feet of building space”), Posner ignores the overall objective of the series to present both the expansion of the national security state apparatus and the contraction of executive and congressional oversight and budgetary control. Each article in the series is replete with on-the-record quotations highlighting this alarming dynamic.

    In order to disparage the Post’s surely sanitized series, Lord Posner erects a straw man gleaned from his distressingly narrow reading. (Though I did enjoy his incongruous valentine to James Clapper, soon to be appointed Director of National Intelligence, at essay’s end.) It is Posner’s judgment, not that of the Post’s report, that is regrettably context-free, a thinness that will promote its cementing as conventional wisdom.

  29. 29.

    mistermix

    July 31, 2010 at 2:05 pm

    @SGEW: Hey, thanks, I didn’t know he had softened on that.

  30. 30.

    bago

    July 31, 2010 at 2:28 pm

    @DickSpudCouchPotatoDetective: Some things are more important than others.

  31. 31.

    Corner Stone

    July 31, 2010 at 2:40 pm

    @jwb:

    How about organizing groups to make regular calls to congresscritters, write letters to the editor, rallies to draw attention to particular political causes, etc., etc., etc.—you know, all the normal things that activists do (and some leftist groups continue to do) in order to make a political movement visible.

    Why would they? They can’t deliver on any promises made to membership so why burn and churn?
    MoveOn last tried something the WH didn’t want and they got punked. Haven’t seen them engage on anything significant since then have we?
    Look at AR. Independent groups plus some union backing tried to change the status quo. What happened? The WH marshaled the most popular D in AR to call people stupid if they didn’t vote for Lincoln.
    At some point it has to be admitted that they just don’t give a shit what you want.

  32. 32.

    Amanda in the South Bay

    July 31, 2010 at 3:31 pm

    Let’s be honest, the intelligence community is something of a sacred cow since 9/11. No president or congressmember will ever cut it in the miniscule chance a massive terrorist attack does occur.

    Another thing: with the ridiculous expansion and creation of useless and redundant three letter agencies, I’d be worried about the quality of talent recruited. I remember in the Army I met someone in the National Guard who was a contractor with one of those agencies (don’t think it exists-counterintelligence something or other) And he was not the sharpest knife in the cutlery drawer, honestly. And fucking fullnof himself.

  33. 33.

    jwb

    July 31, 2010 at 3:50 pm

    @Corner Stone: “At some point it has to be admitted that they just don’t give a shit what you want.” My, you’re sounding like Nick today.

  34. 34.

    Mark S.

    July 31, 2010 at 3:57 pm

    @SGEW:

    Thanks for that link. It’s too bad nobody in DC has read Keynes, because I’m still hearing a lot of bullshit like the federal budget is the same as a family budget. We’re going to be in this recession for a long fucking time thanks to these idiots.

  35. 35.

    Mark S.

    July 31, 2010 at 4:06 pm

    You would think as a judge Posner might have found this statistic to be rather troubling:

    Every day, collection systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications.

    How in Christ’s name is that constitutional? Or did I miss the 4th Amendment being repealed?

  36. 36.

    Amanda in the South Bay

    July 31, 2010 at 4:36 pm

    I have enough grudging respect for Posner that I can sorta see where he is coming from. It’s like doing a series on the military and detailing all the ships, aircraft, vehicles, bases, etc and not bringing up the issue of what are the United States responsibilities: global policeman, hegemon, empire, isolationist fortress, isolationist pacifist paradise, etc.

  37. 37.

    Xanthippas

    July 31, 2010 at 11:59 pm

    That’s not very convincing. I think people don’t care because they don’t care. To wit, I wasn’t exactly seeing my liberal friends going crazy about it on their blogs or Twitter. We’re used to it, we essentially accept it (or at least think there’s nothing we can do about it) and there’s really nothing that makes that explanation more palatable.

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