After viewing the frankness and clarity of language which suffused the recent hearings on the Downing Street Minutes, I am more convinced than ever of a need to mount an attack on the phrase “intelligence failure.” Joe Wilson and Ray McGovern’s testimony revealed how misleading this phrase is, yet it is the de facto method of framing reports and analysis within the mainstream media. The press has allowed the administration to limn the debate on this issue; virtually every article concerning the intelligence community and the lead-up to the war with Iraq uses this phrase. But language matters: either the Administration is right and the war on Iraq was the result of a wholesale failure of our intelligence community, or the Downing Street Minutes are correct, and the Administration planned to do this all along.
[More below the fold and AmericaSedition.org]
The problem is that the words “intelligence failure” carry with them what George Lakoff and other cognitive linguists refer to as a “cognitive frame.” A frame is a cognitive structure which actually limns thinking about any set of facts and prevents other ways of conceptualizing those same facts. Consider the word “failure.” It suggests something unforeseen, accidental, not blameworthy. In addition, “failure” is always being used in the singular, as if there were no redundancies or “checks and balances” within our intelligence-gathering systems designed to present the Administration only with “known knowns” and ensure only modest inferences about “known unknowns.” In essence, using the “intelligence failure” cognitive frame makes the presentation of facts far less damaging to the administration. We need to work harder to re-frame the debate with language that is less forgiving to the White House and more “reality based.” It is partially for this reason that the progressive blogging community is having so much difficulty getting mainstream media coverage on the DSM; the reporters and viewers of those media outlets, like most Americans, are hostage to language and a conceptual frame that was built to obscure, rather than reveal, the truth.
As Joe Wilson and Ray McGovern’s testimony clearly indicates, it is utterly preposterous that the CIA, as an institution, actually thought that Iraq had WMD. But words like “intelligence failure” as a cognitive frame makes this view appear somewhat reasonable. We, however, know that the “failures” in question were of a very peculiar kind:
- they were isolated, concentrated, and unprecedented; they consistently and exclusively favored a single, non-empirical worldview to the exclusion of all others; they suddenly, and inexplicably, resulted in the complete reversal of common knowledge up until that point; and they conveniently dovetailed with the Bush Administration’s desire for war.
But to simplify matters, we might want to recognize how close this begins to sound like the word “plan”:
plan. n.
1. A scheme, program, or method worked out beforehand for the accomplishment of an objective.
2. A proposed or tentative project or course of action.
3. A systematic arrangement of elements or important parts; a configuration or outline.
4. A drawing or diagram made to scale showing the structure or arrangement of something.
5. In perspective rendering, one of several imaginary planes perpendicular to the line of vision between the viewer and the object being depicted.
6. A program or policy stipulating a service or benefit.
Here is an example of the “intelligence failure” problem in situ from the Washington Post:
Two Army analysts whose work has been cited as part of a key intelligence failure on Iraq — the claim that aluminum tubes sought by the Baghdad government were most likely meant for a nuclear weapons program rather than for rockets — have received job performance awards in each of the past three years, officials said. [. . .]
The Army analysts concluded that it was highly unlikely that the tubes were for use in Iraq’s rocket arsenal, a finding that bolstered a CIA contention that they were destined for nuclear centrifuges, which was in turn cited by the Bush administration as proof that Saddam Hussein was reconstituting Iraq’s nuclear weapons program.
The problem, according to the commission, which cited the two analysts’ work, is that they did not seek or obtain information available from the Energy Department and elsewhere showing that the tubes were indeed the type used for years as rocket-motor cases by Iraq’s military. The panel said the finding represented a “serious lapse in analytic tradecraft” because the center’s personnel “could and should have conducted a more exhaustive examination of the question.”
The main objective of this article is to reveal how the Bush Administration is promoting and rewarding incompetence. It is indeed worrisome that two officers are being rewarded when their avoidable mistakes contributed to an unnecessary war, the loss of billions of dollars, and the deaths of thousands of soldiers and civilians. However, the fact that the article is articulated within the “intelligence failure” cognitive frame actively prevents seeing these events in terms of stratagem and deceit. The article describes these highly trained and seasoned analysts as lacking “analytic tradecraft” because they did not “seek or obtain information” about these tubes from previous studies and reports.
Do you expect me to take it seriously that two experts in atomic weapons systems tasked to study the possible use of these tubes for an Iraqi nuclear program didn’t do any research before putting national security and their reputations and jobs on the line? The fact that there were multiple, widely available, and familiar sources which had proof that these were the very same tubes used in Iraq’s rocket systems should indicate that this information was not mistaken, but constructed. Not a failure, but a plan.
