Intelligence_ From Secrets to Policy - Mark M. Lowenthal [103]
After the start of the Iraq war (2003- ), the estimate process came under intense scrutiny and criticism. Among the concerns were the influence of past estimates, the groupthink issue, the use of language that seemed to suggest more certainty than existed in the sources, inconsistencies between summary paragraphs (called key judgments, or KJs) and actual text, and the speed with which the estimate was written. This last criticism was interesting in that the estimate was written at the request of the Senate, to meet its three-week deadline before voting on the resolution granting the president authority to use force against Iraq. Frequent leaks of NIEs on a variety of Iraq-related topics led some to charge that the intelligence community was at war with the Bush administration.
Since the Iraq WMD NIE, there has also been increased political pressure, largely coming from Congress, to have at least the KJs of the estimates made public. The KJs for Prospects for Iraq’s Stability: A Challenging Road Ahead (January 2007) and The Terrorist Threat to the Homeland (July 2007) were published. As could be expected, members of Congress who take issue with the Bush administration’s policies have used these published documents as confirmation of their own political stances. Although this does not contravene any rules or procedures, it does have the effect of immediately injecting the NIEs into a partisan debate. On October 24, 2007, DNI McConnell announced his judgment that declassified KJs should not be published and that he did not accept recent publication as a precedent. However, the Iran nuclear NIE’s KJs were published just seven weeks later, undercutting McConnell’s stance. The publication of KJs is likely to continue (see chap. 10), and this may have an effect on the willingness of analysts or NIE managers to make strong calls because of their reluctance to be drawn into partisan debates. It also tends to misuse NIEs as factual refutations of administration policies, thus changing the very basis by which an estimate is crafted. Also, given the instant political analysis to which released NIEs are subject, this process has the odd effect of taking a strategic document and turning it into current intelligence.
It is also possible that too much emphasis is now put on estimates. Although they do represent the collective views of the intelligence agencies and are signed by the DNI and given to the president, estimates are not the only form of strategic intelligence produced within the analytic community. However, estimates—or the lack of them—have come to be seen as the only indicator of whether the intelligence community is treating an issue strategically. This certainly was the critique of the 9/11 Commission, whose report castigated the community for not producing an NIE on terrorism for several years before 9/11. Strategic intelligence analysis can take many forms and can be written either by several agencies or by one. NIEs are not the only available format, and their existence or absence does not indicate the seriousness with which the intelligence community views an issue.
COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS. The U.S. intelligence community believes in the concept of competitive analysis—having different agencies with different points of view work on the same issue. Because the United States has several intelligence agencies—including three major all-source analytical agencies (CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency, and INR)—every relevant actor understands that the agencies have different analytical strengths and, likely, different points of view on a given issue. By having each of them—and other agencies as well on some issues—analyze an issue, the belief is that the analysis will be stronger and more likely to give policy makers accurate intelligence.
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