Terrorism,Intelligence and Law Enforcement: Learning the Right Lessons

More than a generation ago, in the wake of investigations by the US Congress into improprieties carried out by US intelligence agencies, the United States, in effect, raised the wall between intelligence and law enforcement in order to protect the liberties of Americans. For similar reasons, its Cold War institutions enshrined distinctions between foreign and domestic, and public and private. The CIA was and is, for instance, enjoined from law enforcement and domestic activity.

Those distinctions served the country tolerably well during the Cold War but set it up to fail on September 11. Now, a rethinking of them is underway, as the balance between security and liberty is re-struck. It is imperative, though, to learn the right lessons on September 11. That means thinking carefully and proceeding slowly as changes are made. It also means carefully evaluating the effects of proposed changes, especially to avoid ‘pain for no gain’ measures that do inconvenience people, or even affect their liberties, for little or no gain in the war on terrorism.     

Between Franks and Butler: British Intelligence Lessons from the Gulf War

Lessons for the intelligence community were publicly identified in a 1983 report by Lord Franks and a 2004 report by Lord Butler. However, little is known of the lessons learned during the 20 years between the two. This article draws upon two newly released, previously classified, documents which examine British intelligence lessons from the 1990–91 Gulf War. It provides a previously untold account of the crisis, exclusively from a British intelligence perspective, and presents new evidence that intersects across many intelligence debates. This article also challenges whether identified lessons remained learned and begins to question the wider learning process within the intelligence community.     

Beveridge at Eighty: Learning the Right Lessons

The eightieth anniversary of the Beveridge inquiry is a timely moment to consider how the landmark report is used within contemporary UK politics. Calls for a ‘new Beveridge’ reflect a desire for a rupture with the past and the creation of a radical new welfare consensus. But this reflects a misunderstanding: Beveridge's approach was organic in nature, building on decades of experimentation, politically contested rather than consensual, and intellectually pluralist rather than moored to a single ideological worldview. The real insight Beveridge offers us today flows not from his substantive agenda—which was rooted in a particular set of historic circumstances—but as an approach to securing social reform. Successful welfare advances over the last generation have drawn on these ‘Beveridgean instincts’. Rather than calling for a new twenty-first century blueprint to be handed down from above, reformers should build on experimentation and successful incremental change, from within the UK and abroad.     

Learning Contested Lessons: Participation Equity and Electric Utility Regulation

Electric utilities have typically enjoyed a close and cooperative relationship with the state regulatory bodies that oversee them. In 2001, the Colorado Public Utilities Commission mandated that the largest Colorado utility build a wind power plant as part of its conventional generating capacity, despite the utility's vigorous objections. Local environmental groups, intervening in a form of rule making called Integrated Resource Planning, succeeded in overturning regulatory capture. This paper explains this anomalous case and highlights the role of knowledge and learning in the outcome. The case shows the opportunities and limitations of using contested technical knowledge to push for institutional learning. The case also suggests the importance of repeated policy processes. Wind energy advocates perceived that they had acquired participation equity, ownership in the process akin to Kingdon's “softening up,” which led policy makers to take their arguments more seriously, opening up the possibility of institutional learning.     

Policy Lessons from Iraq on Managing Uncertainty in Intelligence Assessment: Why the Strategic/Tactical Distinction Matters

This paper focuses on how pre-existing policy priorities and goals among policy elites in the US, UK, and Australia encouraged the blurring of strategic and tactical intelligence assessment as a mechanism for legitimising the Iraq invasion. Through the selective use and interpretation of sometimes vague or unsubstantiated tactical and technical intelligence and the many uncertainties it contained, proponents of the war were able to undermine existing strategic assessments on Iraq by introducing a range of possible, but largely unsubstantiated, threat scenarios as justification for military action. The paper argues that in so far as intelligence reforms are needed, they should be focused primarily on the interface between analysis and policy making, and the issue of how policy makers interpret and understand the uncertainties that intelligence assessments necessarily contain.     

Three Philosophical Lessons for the Analysis of Criminal and Military Intelligence

It has recently been suggested that philosophy – in particular, epistemology – has a contribution to make to the analysis of criminal and military intelligence. The present article pursues this suggestion, taking three phenomena that have recently been studied by philosophers, and showing that they have important implications for the gathering and sharing of intelligence, and for the use of intelligence in the determining ofstrategy. The phenomena discussed are: (1) Simpson's Paradox, (2) the distinction between resiliency and reliability of data, and (3) the Causal Markov Condition.     

Learning in government programs and the usefulness of cost-benefit analysis: Lessons from manpower and urban renewal history

Especially in the social program area, the outcomes of new programs are extremely difficult to predict, and it is rarely clear a priori which of several competing program techniques ought to be tried. In such an atmosphere, ex post program evaluation methods which take account of possibilities of “learning by doing” can promote the selection over time of those program elements which maximize beneficial results per unit cost. A basic premise of this paper is that recent applications of cost-benefit techniques have frequently ignored learning considerations, greatly reducing their usefulness. The “learning by doing” features of the recent history of manpower and urban renewal programs are examined to demonstrate the plausibility of this premise.     

Counterinsurgency agent networks and noncombatant-targeted violence

In counterinsurgency, agent networks are double-edged swords. They are useful tools for degrading insurgent influence and protecting the population. However, they also endanger the population in some ways, as we have seen with mass executions of suspected agents and agent misdirection of raids. Identifying how/why this occurs is critical for developing intelligence practices to more effectively implement COIN strategies. This exploratory study uses three recent counterinsurgency cases – for which significant secondary open-source agent network documentation is available – to identify, describe, organize and analyse patterns of noncombatant-targeted violence associated with human intelligence networks. Identified cases of noncombatant-targeted violence in Operation Enduring Freedom – Afghanistan, Operation Iraqi Freedom, and the – Israeli–Palestinian conflict are used to develop a theoretical framework that models intelligence-related violence incentivization, which also draws from theoretical literature on human intelligence, civil war violence, police states, community policing, and the sociology of betrayal.     

The Jenin Initiative: Counterinsurgency by Capacity Building

In late 2008, as negotiations between the Israelis and the Palestinians faltered, the US directed the Jenin Initiative on the ground in the West Bank. Designed to inspire confidence in Washington’s security-driven ‘West Bank First’ strategy, the Jenin Initiative married economic development to security sector reform under the Palestinian Authority. Drawing on the perspectives of those responsible for implementing the Jenin Initiative, this article reveals how counterinsurgency doctrine transplanted from the ‘war on terror’ shaped US interventions that built capacity in the Palestinian Authority. The Jenin Initiative exposes the extent of US intervention to create an effective apparatus of Palestinian self-policing to enhance – but not replace – that of the Israeli occupation.