[ExI] Tenet, was Regarding Wickedness

[spike]

> bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Randall Randall
> Subject: Re: [ExI] Tenet, was Regarding Wickedness
> 
> 
> On Nov 25, 2007, at 12:36 PM, spike wrote:
> 
> > If Tenet didn't know for sure, how could anyone below him?
> 
> I don't understand your question...

Randall^2, the answer to your puzzlement is that Tenet's people are
compartmentalized.  The director's knowledge is a superset of the knowledge
of any one of his Direct Reports or DRs.  (The term DR does not refer to a
paper or file, but rather a person. DRs are people who have no levels of
management between themselves and the director, so they report directly to
the boss.  Tenet was a DR to Bush and also Bush's predecessor whose name
escapes me at the moment, that NY senator's husband.) 

> How could Tenet know *anything* that
> someone below him did not know, assuming
> his knowledge came from actual intel-
> gathering folk?...  Randall Randall <randall at randallsquared.com>

Tenet would know stuff from his other DRs that most of the intelligence
gathering folk wouldn't know because they were intentionally excluded from
that particular compartment.  Compartmentalization prevents various
investigating groups from contaminating each other with the same erroneous
information.  A common technique in a case where the evidence is ambiguous
or contradictory is to assign two or more DRs to investigate, then see if
their reports agree, or if one appears to be a superset of the other, or if
one has better evidence, or if one can uncover evidence of another report
having relied upon counterfeit evidence.  

Often they intentionally assign investigators with historically opposing
partisan points of view, then the director studies the differences in their
reports.  This was initially suggested as a reason why the white house sent
Joe Wilson to investigate Niger.  Turns out it wasn't the reason.  The white
house didn't send Joe Wilson, anti-war partisans within the CIA did that.
Didn't matter anyway: Wilson didn't write a report.  

Tenet mentions in his book that he was getting conflicting reports before
the invasion, for he wsa getting layer upon layer of intentional
obfuscation, conflicting reports from Iraqi expatriates, conflicting reports
from CIA employees of middle eastern descent (which we learned last week
included at least one mole), conflicting evidence which needed to be
examined to discriminate the genuine from the bogus.  He was getting reports
from high ranking Iraqi defectors, the reliability of which was unknown.  He
was getting info from interrogation of captured (apparently Iraqi)
terrorists, again with unknown reliability.  

>From all that, then director of central intelligence Tenet had to distill a
message and present it to Bush, who also had other sources of intelligence
on which Tenet was not briefed.  Tenet reported to Bush the assessment that
invading Iraq was a "slam dunk."  It doesn't surprise me that Tenet and the
others got it mostly wrong.  

>From the released interrogations, Saddam himself apparently didn't know for
sure what weapon systems he had, how many and which would work, and which
systems were in the hands of generals who had no intentions of using them in
a hopeless cause.  Of course Saddam didn't count on a mass defection of his
entire army as soon as the shooting started, leaving ragtag bands of
insurgents to fight the coalition forces.  This would explain his often
repeated Mother Of All Battles comments, which turned out to be less than
the granddaughter of all skirmishes, where few Iraqi regulars put up a
halfhearted defense of the Baghdad Airport, with predictable results.  But
that was pretty much it for the second Iraq war.  

Note that in Center of the Storm, Tenet does not suggest anywhere that he
was pressured from above to find evidence supporting one conclusion or
another, either by Bush or Bush's predecessor.  I can't imagine Tenet
pressuring his own DRs to find supporting evidence for a particular opinion,
although that accusation is tossed about freely.  If he had, there would be
documentation for his having issued illegal orders.  With the entire
intelligence machine of the US reporting to him, Tenet bet his career that
there were nukes in Iraq.  He was wrong.  He bet it all, he lost.

Randall^2 check out Center of the Storm.  It answers a lot of mysteries.  

spike