There's nobody like the British. The things they get excited about! A terrible thing has happened. Their prime minister lied to them! The whole country is in an uproar. And - how awful! - the intelligence services have trimmed their findings to suit their political boss. Astounding! In Israel, the United States and most other places around the world, this would hardly rate a paragraph on an inside page. The prime minister lied? So what else is new? -- Uri Avnery
People in the intelligence community just love jargon. They seem to share an unspoken rule that one should never use plain English speech when an acronym will do. Hence, intelligence derived from reading communications is never “communications intelligence”, but COMINT. Likewise, anything learned from electronic sources is ELINT; and information from human sources, i.e. your traditional, run-of-the-mill spy, is HUMINT.
There are occasions when the assessments of allegedly competent and experienced intelligence services turn out to be just plain wrong: one obvious example would be the confident pre-invasion claims made by the American and British establishments, warning us of the imminent threat posed to our way of life, indeed our very lives, by Iraqi CW stockpiles and WMDs that – oops! – turned out not to actually exist.
When there is such a disparity between intelligence claims and the reality on the ground, it is natural to ask what kind of sources did our intelligence services use to reach their baseless conclusions. The phrase “faith-based intelligence” has recently been coined to describe unjustified conclusions that are drawn without any objective evidence to back them up, but some intelligence circles are way ahead of the jargon curve. They already have a well-established acronym for the kind of information that produces claims that turn out to be embarassingly unfounded. It’s jokingly called URINT, and it’s called that because it is intelligence that you circulate based on no empirical source at all, beyond a nagging feeling in one’s water.
Apparently, URINT is not only an accepted intelligence source for the UKUSA alliance; when it comes to the claims about Iraqi WMD, it seems that our Israeli allies regard it as a legitimate source too. Reporting on an assessment by Brigadier General Shlomo Brom, from Tel Aviv University’s Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, the Washington Post has revealed that Israel was a "full partner" in U.S. and British intelligence failures that exaggerated former president Saddam Hussein's nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.
Brom’s report dismisses the hysterical evaluations of Iraq's nonconventional weapons put forward by Israeli military intelligence on the eve of the invasion. He concludes that the threats they identified were exaggerated, the money expended in defending against the imaginary threat was wasted, and the panic stirred up among the Israeli public by the prospect of an imminent nuclear attack had no foundation in fact. Gen. Brom spares us the jargon, and speaks of weaknesses and inherent flaws within Israeli intelligence and among Israeli decision-makers. But however he words it, Israel’s fictitious intelligence evaluations are URINT by any other name.
Brom goes on to consider the possibility that Israel’s inaccurate evaluations were not innocent mistakes, but represent a deliberate manipulation of intelligence to ensure that, with or without a foundation in fact, the U.S. would have intelligence justifications to take out an Iraqi regime that was hostile to Israel. The Israeli intelligence services and political leaders provided an exaggerated assessment of Iraqi capabilities, raising the possibility that the intelligence picture was manipulated, as WaPo concludes. Well duh no shit, as those of us would say who never believed for a minute that Saddam ever had nukes, simply because we knew that if any evidence of WMDs actually existed, Secretary of State Powell would not have been reduced to using home-made “Winnebagoes of Death” graphics in his embarrassing display before the U.N. Security Council.
But shouldn’t the end result – i.e. the removal of a dictator hostile to Israel – justify for the Israeli public the deceptive means used? Not according to Brom. Intelligence organizations live or die by the credibility of their product, and if they sell that credibility for short-term gain they will not easily get it back. If it is known that Israeli military intelligence lied over the threat from Iraq, who will believe us next time, he asks, when we claim – perhaps truthfully – that we have evidence of WMDs in Iran? We could of course go one step further than Brom, and ask whether Israelis should also wonder whether a military/intelligence establishment that tells ideologically-motivated lies to its friends and allies might also lie to the public it ostensibly serves. If they lie to you today in Gaza, they’ll lie to you tomorrow in Tel Aviv, to paraphrase Israeli journalist Amira Hass’ criticism of the disinformation the IDF peddles to journalists at briefings on its activities in the Occupied Territories.
Uzi Benziman discussed in greater detail the implications of ideologically-driven intelligence for the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, reminding Ha’aretz readers that the very same intelligence “experts” who produced the false estimates of Iraq's non-conventional weapons capability are responsible for keeping Israel’s political leadership informed about prevailing trends in the Palestinian Authority. Benziman points out that these officials enjoy a presumption of credibility, professionalism and objectivity in Israeli society, and are assumed to deploy highly sophisticated means of keeping tabs on what's going on with the enemy. And yet,
[t]he very same officials who concluded emphatically that Saddam possessed chemical-biological weapons, and who even warned about the possible use of such weapons against Israel, warn today that Yasser Arafat's master plan is to destroy Israel. The same officials who forecasted definitively that the "ground will shake" when American troops reach Iraq and uncover weapons of mass destruction are today warning, with great internal conviction, that Arafat views himself as a latter-day Saladin, whose purpose is to drive the Jews from the Holy Land.
The layman assumes that such emphatic diagnoses of Arafat's aims are based upon wiretapped recordings, systematic analyses of his statements, and reliable leaks about his conversations with associates. The same measure of credence was in effect when people believed that intelligence estimates of the threat posed by Iraq had a solid evidentiary foundation; but it now turns out that these estimates about Iraq had no empirical basis. Rather than being founded on solid information, the estimates relied on probability and circumstantial evidence. This experience regarding Iraq raises questions about the empirical foundations of intelligence reports that purport to unveil Arafat's inner world, his aims, goals and hopes.
Former Soviet Premier Nikita Kruschev’s son, Dmitri, was visiting the U.S. this spring, and commented that the Russian public would never swallow our mass media’s uncritical support for the approaching war in Iraq, as much of the U.S. public seemed to have done. Seventy years of reading Pravda had taught Soviet citizens to recognize disinformation when they saw it. They had learned that when the mass media published a story plugging the official government line, they should say to themselves:
1. This story is a lie.
2. Why are they lying to me?
3. What is the real story?
Perhaps the lesson of the Great URINT War of 2003 is that we all need to develop some of that healthy Soviet skepticism, and to keep in mind Benziman’s conclusion that ideology (more than any other factor) shapes intelligence positions. “We have no partner for peace!” is such a catchy slogan, and provides such good cover for people who don't really want to talk peace anyway; but it loses its effectiveness when we remember that it is brought to us courtesy of the very same crowd who brought us “Gas masks on! Saddam is about to nuke Tel Aviv!”.
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