9/11: The Failure of Strategic Intelligence

Professor Goodman analyses the failure of US intelligence prior to 9/11 setting the context in the 1980s and 1990s. He dissects the flaws of the CIA, FBI and the Pentagon. He argues that the State Department should be strengthened because its capabilities are the most important. He also recommends that the FBI be split in two and that the CIA's budget be disclosed.     

Ethics and Intelligence after September 2001

Anthony Glees, The Secrets of the Service: British Intelligence and Communist Subversion 1939–51 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1987). Pp.447; £18.

Robert A. Pollard, Economic Security and the Origins of the Cold War, 1945–1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). Pp.378; $32.50 and $14.50.

Peter Taylor, Stalker: the Search for the Truth (London: Faber and Faber, 1987). Pp.231, £9.95, paperback £4.95.

Frank Doherty, The Stalker Affair: Including an Account of British Secret Service Operations in Ireland (Cork and Dublin: Mercier Press, 1986). Pp.90, IR£3.95.

K.G. Robertson (ed.), Intelligence and National Security (London: Macmillan, 1987). Pp.281.

William Blum, The CIA: A Forgotten History. U.S. Global Interventions Since World War 2 (London: Zed Books Ltd., 1986). Pp.428. $19.95.

Joan Miller, One Girl's War: Personal Exploits in MIS's Most Secret Station (Dublin: Brandon Book Publishers, 1986). Pp.155. £5.95.     

The 9/11 Terrorist Attacks: A Failure of Policy Not Strategic Intelligence Analysis

Abstract

The 9/11 terrorist attacks have been intensively examined as both tactical and strategic intelligence failures but less attention has been paid to the policy failures which preceded them. Perhaps this is due to the presumption that intelligence analysis influences decision-making as a precursor to and foundation for policy. This assumption about the influence of analysis on decision deserves a much closer examination. The 9/11 terrorist attacks provide a good case to study for greater understanding of the influence, or lack of influence, that intelligence analysis has on decision-making. Specifically, the 9/11 Commission Report identifies as a significant failure the lack of a National Intelligence Estimate on the terrorist threat between 1998 and 2001, and implies that if one had been produced it might have helped enable decision-makers to prevent the 9/11 attacks. In other words, a failure of strategic intelligence analysis lay at the foundation of the failure to prevent 9/11. But was this really the case? This article takes a closer look at the case of the missing National Intelligence Estimate by first evaluating what decision-makers knew about the threat prior to the 9/11 attacks, the policies they were implementing at the time, and the extent to which the hypothetical National Intelligence Estimate described by the 9/11 Commission would have mattered in terms of influencing their judgement and policy for the better. It concludes that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were more a failure of policy than strategic intelligence analysis.     

Structure and Strategies: Two Faces of Civic Activism in India

Abstract

This paper explains the success of civic actors in achieving their aims by reference to their organizational structure. Based on a comparison of a religious nationalist movement and a women's movement in South Asia, I argue that organizational structure is closely linked to the success of a social movement. The lack of coordination and collaboration among women's groups in terms of mission and strategy has led to a perception of the overall movement as weak and marginal. The superior coordination of strategy and mission within the religious nationalist movement have allowed it to effectively use its resources to cause great changes in Indian society.     

Missing the Wake-up Call: Why Intelligence Failures Rarely Inspire Improved Performance

After major intelligence failures it is often asked why intelligence and security officials failed to heed the many ‘wake-up calls’ that had been provided by earlier failures and surprises. This article addresses this question by examining intelligence failures as ‘focusing events’, which is a concept used in the literature on government policy making to explain how disasters and crises can stimulate policy change and help organizations and decision-makers learn. It argues that in order for an intelligence failure such as a major terrorist attack to inspire improved intelligence performance – to be a true wake-up call – that failure must not only act as a focusing event to bring more attention to the threat, but it must also lead to increased intelligence collection and greater receptivity toward intelligence on the part of decision-makers.     

WMD: The Career of a Concept

The danger posed by “weapons of mass destruction” (WMD) was the Bush administration's chief justification for invading Iraq. Amid the din of the chorus that ceaselessly repeated this phrase in 2002–2003, hardly anyone stopped to ask: what is “WMD” anyway? Is it not a mutable social construct rather than a timeless, self-evident concept? Guided by Nietzsche's view of the truth as a “mobile army of metaphors [and] metonyms… which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically,” we present a history of the metonym WMD. We describe how it was coined by the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1937, and subsequently how its meaning was “transposed” and “enhanced” throughout Cold War arms negotiations, in the aftermath of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, and in US domestic law. We also discuss how, in the run-up to the Iraq war, “WMD” did not merely describe an Iraqi threat; it was rather “embellished poetically and rhetorically” in ways that produced and inflated the threat.