Don't Blame the Intelligence Messenger

I have seen a few Presidents and senior government officials question the analysis made by the Intelligence Community.  I always wondered why they did it.  It is a lot like arguing with your attorney about what is right course to take.  You can ignore that advice, or not, but it helps if you are a lawyer yourself.

The Intelligence Community does estimates.  They gather as many facts as they can and come to a conclusion.  It is a best guess, and it comes with a confidence factor - we assess that this conclusion is given with a high confidence.  It is the same as advice from the lawyer.  You are free to disagree.  You are free to ignore the conclusions.  But, don't question the process that goes with it.

An assessment usually comes from a lot of information sources, but sometimes those are limited to what is available.  North Korea, for example does not have as much as anyone would want, those might have less confidence.  They also come with many analyst's views, aggregated into a product that none of agree with exactly, but all of them support.  If not, they can write a minority opinion - kind of.  That can be done formally, or just internally to say "I told you so".

Now, while this process has some blatant failures on occasion, it has been worked and refined for a long, long time.  It is influenced by politics, even though the members of the Community would not agree that it is.  I saw that with Missile Defense when the Congress was splitting hairs on whether a missile could hit the United States.  The Clinton Administration said it couldn't, but agreed that it could hit Hawaii and Alaska.  Ted Stevens from Alaska and Innoue from Hawaii thought this was ludicrous thinking and said so because it was a matter of record that it could hit Hawaii and Alaska.  Clinton didn't care about that.  It wasn't what the IC had said, but there were interpretations of the final product on all political levels including the President.  There always will be.  They fought about it but it didn't become public.  President Clinton wanted to reduce the amount of money going into missile defense and needed a justification for doing that. He got it by twisting what had been said. 

So, take the advice or reject it, but don't complain about the assessment as given.  Order a review of the assessment if you want, or keep quiet and ignore the statements.  Making it public makes it worse on both sides.