Haft of the Spear

… Referring to the public release of the reports, Shedd said during a congressional briefing: “It affects the quality of what’s written.”

What’s the expression the kids are using these days? ROTFLMAO … yeah, that’s it.

Robert Jervis, a Columbia University professor who chairs an advisory panel for the CIA on the declassification of historical documents, said releasing intelligence estimates increases the likelihood their contents will be used for political rather than foreign policy purposes, and influences how they are worded.

“In an ideal world these documents would be as objective, as honest, as separated from the political preferences of the top people as possible,” Jervis said. “If that’s going to be public, you make the pressures of politicization that much greater. When you are writing an executive summary it’s hard not to ask ‘How is this sentence going to read in The New York Times?’”

Honestly …

For starters, what in the world is foreign policy anyway but politics directed beyond your borders? Secondly, if you’re on the House or Senate intelligence committees, you can get NIEs, which means they’re in the hands of people who will play politics with them. Finally, having a policy that hinders formal declassification doesn’t mean they’re not going to be leaked to the NYT anyway.

“There are some things that should be secret,” [Jervis] said. “If an NIE is any good at all on a hot topic, it’s going to draw heavily on secret information.”

No, actually, if an NIE – or any assessment – is any good at all, it provides policymakers with the insights they need to make good decisions: secrets may have little or no bearing on the issue. You can build classified assessments on nothing but unclassified information (which I’ve done) and if your analysis and conclusions are sufficiently original and perceptive (my customers seemed to like them), you’ve done your job without ever dealing with secrets.

I believe the DNI is in fact trying to minimize the role NIE’s play in the political process, but this is really an exercise in futility. Someone, somewhere isn’t going to like something and it’ll get leaked. Retreating to the cloister isn’t the answer; get our in front and deal with the issues head on. Inform the people in a responsible fashion and not only do you take the sting out of the actions of the irresponsible, you come out looking like the good guy.

And yes, it is not intelligence’s job to inform the people, but let’s face it: in an age of information, when powerful search, analysis and rendering tools are available to all at no or low cost, the raison d’etre of an intelligence community is increasingly at risk. You have got to prove your value, because if you are outperformed by the Army of Analysts, people are going to wonder just why in the world we are paying [insert soon-to-be-released intel budget number here] for.