A weak pillar for American national security: The CIA's dismal performance against WMD threats

American preemptive or preventive military action against WMD-armed adversaries in the future will simply not be feasible without high-quality and timely intelligence. But is American intelligence up to this load-bearing task for the post-11 September national security? This article surveys the Central Intelligence Agency's record of gauging potential WMD threats for more than a decade and assesses its overall performance as dismal. The CIA's recent intelligence debacle against Iraq was one of the greatest in a long series of failures that has publicly exposed the Agency's profound weaknesses. These intelligence failures were due in large measure to the CIA's poor human intelligence collection and shoddy analysis, areas that cannot be remedied alone by the creation of the new Director of National Intelligence post. This article recommends steps needed to increase the quality of intelligence produced by CIA, or elsewhere in the new intelligence community, to move American intelligence in lockstep with military transformation to give the Commander-in-Chief realistic options for countering hostile nation-states or terrorist groups seeking or acquiring WMD.     

The UK–US intelligence alliance in 1975: Economies,evaluations and explanations

Intelligence and defence are often cited as central to the fabric of Anglo-American relations after 1945. However, we still know relatively little about how the Anglo-American intelligence relationship changed during the latter part of the twentieth century. During the 1960s and 1970s the UK continued its long retreat from its world role, driven by recurrent economic crises at home and anti-colonial nationalism abroad. This essay examines UK intelligence in the mid-1970s in the light of recent archival releases pertaining to the Roy Mason Defence Review. This material sheds interesting light on tensions between the military and diplomats in Whitehall over defence intelligence. More importantly, it appears to show that, partly because of the contraction of defence dispositions, UK intelligence activities were called upon to compensate and therefore became relatively more important as a substantive contribution to the alliance.     

Post-9/11 wartime intelligence analysis

A few years into the Iraq War, those engaged in that fight realized that the methods of intelligence analysis, refined in Cold War, were not sufficient for wartime. To manage the massive increase in intelligence data new analytic tools were adopted for unearthing and connecting key developments and individuals hidden from view within it. Only then could the secret networks of Iraqi insurgents be uncovered. Several of these changes were put into practice by the US counterterrorism force that deployed to Iraq as Task Force 714. The study describes what these changes encompassed, and how they were employed to support those given the mission of attacking and dismantling Al-Qaeda in Iraq’s networked underground.     

The Waldegrave Initiative and secret service archives: New materials and new policies

Louise Atherton, Top Secret: An Interim Guide to Recent Releases of Intelligence Records at the Public Record Office (London: PRO Publications, 1993). Pp.32. £3.25. ISBN 1 87362073.

Louise Atherton, SOE Operations in the Far East: An Introductory Guide to the Newly Released Records of the Special Operations Executive in the Public Record Office (London: PRO Publications, 1993). Pp.59. £3.25. ISBN 1 873162081.

Louise Atherton, SOE Operations in Scandinavia: A Guide to the Newly Released Records in the Public Record Office (London: PRO Publications, 1994). Pp.34. £3.25. ISBN 1 873162154.

FCO Historical Branch, Changes in British and Russian Records Policy: Occasional Papers No.7 (London: Historical Branch, LRD, 1993). Pp.42.

FCO Historical Branch, FCO Records: Policy Practice and Posterity, 1782–1993 (London: Historical Branch, LRD, Second Edition, 1993). Pp.17.     

The moral hazards of neo-liberalism: lessons from the private insurance industry

The key tenets of neo-liberalism regarding risk, governance, and responsibility are critically evaluated through an empirical study of the private insurance industry. Recent tendencies in this industry towards increasing segmentation of consumers regarding risk, and towards an expansion of private policing of insurance fraud, are analysed. The definition of moral hazard is broadened to include all parties in the insurance relationship, not just the insured. Moral hazards embedded in the social organization of private insurance lead to various kinds of immoral risky behaviour by insureds, insurance companies, and their employees, and to intensified efforts to regulate this behaviour. The analysis concludes with some critical observations about the neo-liberal emphasis on minimal state, market fundamentalism, risk-taking, individual responsibility, and acceptance of inequality.     

The architecture of risk management

Abstract

Power's book examines how organizations are designed through risk-based science, law and managerial techniques. As organizations have come to think of, reform and govern themselves through the vague but powerful notion of risk, both the fortunes of the managers who conceive of these designs and the behaviour of the organizations themselves have been affected. Power develops four themes as he analyses the consequences of these moves towards risk management as governance. First, he notes the tensions that have emerged as risk management systems take in information about uncertainty in the operational environment and process it into risk, while simultaneously producing yet more uncertainty. Second, he offers an account of developments in the system of professions as the abstractions of mathematical risk analysts have lost ground to managerial approaches to the processing and uses of risk. Third, he applies neo-liberal notions of the individual to organizational behaviour in an analysis of the conflict between risk-embracing profit motives and risk-averse precautionary instincts. Fourth, he argues that the uptake of risk management techniques and discourses in organizations has fundamentally changed the way they view themselves and operate in the world. As better risk management through internal self-control has become the obvious solution to every problem, enterprise values and trust have imploded. We close our review with a critique of this implosion thesis, suggesting directions for future research for socio-legal, governance and organizational behaviour scholars.     

Regional prosperities compared: Massachusetts and Baden-Württemberg in the 1980s

This article compares the relationship between economic development and public policy in two of the most prosperous regions of the 1980s: Massachusetts in the United States and Baden-Württemberg in West Germany. Beginning with a critique of the theory of the product life-cycle, the article examines the rise and fall of traditional industries in Massachusetts and their survival in Baden-Württemberg. It then goes on to consider the rise–but also the vulnerability–of the high-tech and financial firms in Massachusetts, as well as the more robust, though almost invisible growth of these sectors in Baden-Württemberg. The burden of the argument is that there are, strictly speaking, no ‘mature’ industries and public policies aimed at stimulating innovation are most successful when the latter is integrated into the local industrial structure as a whole rather than isolated into a distinct high-tech sector.     

Beyond the Blame Game: Political Strategies for State Funding Reform

There is growing concern that intergovernmental financial relations in the Australian federation are becoming increasingly acrimonious and dysfunctional. This paper argues that it is necessary to analyse State funding as a whole, including the critical relationship between State‐level taxation and its reform and the broader Commonwealth Grants Commission regime, if we are to establish a system of State funding which is financially sustainable, promotes economic efficiency and is broadly congruent with established norms of Australian federalism. Above all, based on international experience, we argue Commonwealth leadership is required to achieve this goal. We conclude with a case study concerning resource taxation which demonstrates how the Commonwealth could provide leadership using a ‘bundled’ approach to policy reform. It is argued that such an approach has the potential to alleviate wider intergovernmental conflicts which currently afflict Australian federalism.     

The Tax Reform Agenda in Australia

This paper applies concepts developed in the Policy Agendas Project (PAP) literature to an analysis of Australian tax policy over the post war period. It argues that a major turning point in the Australian tax policy agenda occurred during the second term of the Hawke Government (1984‐87). Beyond this turning point, and despite the fierce partisan conflict concerning tax policy over the past two decades, there has been remarkaly little difference between Australia's two major parties at the level of substantive policy content. The Australian tax policy agenda over the post war period can be characterised by remarkable policy continuity punctuated by a period of change in the mid 1980s when structural change in the international political economy precipitated unprecedented domestic liberalisation.     

Citizenship,economy and social exclusion of mainland Chinese immigrants in Hong Kong

Hong Kong is often viewed as a Chinese immigrants' city. This article discusses three interrelated dimensions of the social exclusion of migrants designated as “new” Chinese immigrants in Hong Kong. First, it is argued that globalisation has triggered intense economic rivalry among world cities as they undertake economic restructuring. Second, the political attempts of territorial states to establish their own legitimacy and strengthen their governing capacity are major catalysts that induce the social exclusion of immigrants. Third, the nature and strength of local place-based social identity is vital to determine the difficulties new immigrants face in being included in the host society. After recounting the history of Chinese immigrants and their recent profile in Hong Kong, the article examines the relationships between Hong Kong's economic development and the state's immigration policies, and how Hong Kong's state policies have constructed a form of Hong Kong identity vis-à-vis Mainland Chinese, drawing out the mechanisms that determine the social exclusion of Mainland immigrants since the 1990s.

“We asked for workers but human beings came.” Max Frisch(quoted in Hollifield,2000:149)