By Patrick Lang
In 1998 Abram Shulsky and Gary Schmitt wrote an essay titled as above. The burden of this essay was a detailed challenge to the methods of intelligence analysis followed by the US Intelligence commmunity since the immediate post-war era when it was largley codified by Sherman Kent. The S&S essay was largely an attempt to persuade that a “social studies research” approach to intelligence analysis was inadequate and that something else should be substituted.
Why is this of interest?
Abram Shulsky was an important member of the “Office of Special Plans” (OSP) in the Pentagon under Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld.
Gary Schmitt is a major figure in the “Project for a New American Century.” (PNAC). This group is part of the “galaxy” of organizations inhabited by or created by the Jacobin neocons.
Here is the S&S paper.
Download “Leo Strauss and the World of Intelligence.”
I have asked David Habakkuk, a British journalist and scholar specializing in the history of intelligence services to comment on this paper. His remarks are available below, first in excerpt, then through download … continued below, along with the commentary of UPI intelligence consultant Richard Sale:
David Habakkuk: I stress this, because a characteristic of the neocon approach is that wherever we are, we are back in 1938.
Every threat ends up being, in one form or other, Hitler reincarnated. It is difficult to be clear here how far one is dealing with genuine misperception, and how far with manipulative rhetoric.
One might say that the S&S paper itself involves a major problem of ambiguity of evidence, in that it is deeply unclear how far one is dealing with conscious distortion or incomprehension:
Is this an ill-calculated attempt at dealing with intellectual issues relating to intelligence, or a well-calculated piece of propaganda designed to use the technique of the Big Lie in a war against the CIA?
What is clear, and in some ways frightening, is the shamelessness. In her 1988 study of ‘The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss’, Shadia Drury portrayed Strauss as an interesting if deeply flawed thinker, but suggested that what was fundamentally unfortunate about him was that ‘he corrupts’; more specifically, he ‘seduces young men into thinking that they belong to special and privileged class of individuals that transcend ordinary humanity and the rules applicable to other people.'”
David Habakkuk
I also asked Richard Sale to comment upon both the S&S essay and Habbakkuk’s comments. These appear below first in excerpt and then by download. — Pat Lang
Richard Sale: The tragedy of pre-war intelligence was that it was that this tragedy was so willfully entered into.
The senior officials of the first Bush administration would tolerate around them only people who were in tune with their views and predilections. People who presented rebutting evidence were not seen as simply making an honest mistake or havein different views but rather as embodying a perverse will that was ignoring truth out of pride and spiteful wickedness.
This is hardly the path to humility before the facts that is part of the intellectual equipment of the good intelligence analyst.” — Richard Sale
Download The Paper of David Habback by Richard Sale (his full remarks, in PDF format)
This paper contains stunning points. — Richard Sale
[editor’s note, by susanhu] Richard Sale was interviewed by Keith Olbermann last night. Extraordinary interview. It’s too bad we have to wait until Monday morning for the transcript. We should all write to Keith — KOlbermann@msnbc.com — and ask him to invite Richard Sale and Pat Lang (interview transcript, Nov. 9) back on his program.
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Judge for yourself.
Pat Lang
Col. Patrick W. Lang (Ret.), a highly decorated retired senior officer of U.S. Military Intelligence and U.S. Army Special Forces, served as “Defense Intelligence Officer for the Middle East, South Asia and Terrorism” for the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and was later the first Director of the Defense Humint Service. Col. Lang was the first Professor of the Arabic Language at the United States Military Academy at West Point. For his service in the DIA, he was awarded the “Presidential Rank of Distinguished Executive.” He is a frequent commentator on television and radio, including MSNBC’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann (interview), CNN and Wolf Blitzer’s Situation Room (interview), PBS’s Newshour, NPR’s “All Things Considered,” (interview), and more .
Personal Blog: Sic Semper Tyrannis 2005 || Bio || CV
Recommended Books || More BooTrib <a href="Posts
Novel: The Butcher’s Cleaver (download free by chapter, PDF format)
“Drinking the Kool-Aid,” Middle East Policy Council Journal, Vol. XI, Summer 2004, No. 2
Intelligence: The Human Factor (Securing Our Nation)
By Patrick Lang
Editor: Larry C. Johnson
Thank you again Col. Lang, and others, for all of the valuable experience and analysis you share here.
I think the dangers are seen from the top down and it’s especially characteristic of the incomprehensible average Bush supporter.
This is a very good piece about Strauss and Drury’s insightful analysis of him. Link here.
Strauss to me is pretty much like the leader of almost every cult I’ve studied over the years. His techniques to attract followers are elemental; promise those that accept your dogma that they’ll become “special”, that they’ll become “superior” to the hoi polloi, and you’ll get an amazing number of adherents. The WalMart style mega-church preachers operate the same way. They promise the special exalted status of being christian, and now add the very tangible benefit of legitimizing ones own selfishness and greed by claiming these characteristics as some sort of divinely-inspired prosperity. They promise that you can feel free to have all you can get your hands on regardless of how such selfishness may help impoverish one’s neighbors.
It’s easy to see how Strauss could have so easily corrupted so many otherwise blazingly intelligent people.
“The Power of Nightmares”
The three-part BBC documentary on Leo Strauss, his cult following, and what the Neocons are doing …
InfoClearinghouse used to have a pristine copy, along with a full transcript. It’s gone, replaced by a link to the BBC site that only has articles about the documentary series.
I’ve searched. There are other copies out there, but so far I’ve not found one that has decent sound.
If any of you know of good-quality video of this series, please share.
And it makes me sick that the transcripts are gone. (Although it’s infinitely better to watch the video because of the incredibly powerful imagery and the haunting voice of the marvelous narrator.)
I followed references to that series not long ago and wasn’t able to find any remaining transcript or video either.
There’s nothing quite like the modern day equivalent of bookburning to clue us in to the fact that there are terribly wrong things beiong done by those in authority.
This was I, by the way, who posted! I’m so sorry, Pat!
I’d logged in as Pat to update the story, and forgot — per usual — to log out.
But, I must find a good copy of that vidoe. It’s a MISSION!
I’m gonna get confused about who’s who one of these days.
It’s still you who lives in Washington and is friends with the raccoons, right?
Yes, it is I. Btw, I’m worried about the teenage raccoons … this is the time of year that they all get kicked out of their dens by their moms, and they have to find a new home or else they won’t survive the winter. Wish I could make them homes.
Last night, I cooked an organic, free range turkey that I got on sale. I don’t like dark meat, so I gave a gathering of about 8 teenage raccoons a leg and a wing … they loved it so much! They were all grunting — they sound like little pigs when they grunt.
I never pet them because I don’t think it’s wise — so they won’t get too friendly with humans and so they might not bite me (because if I ended up at the ER, I’d have to tell them, and they’d come out and kill the raccoons. (However, that doesn’t make sense since there’s never been a case of raccoon rabies in the state of Wash.)
By the way Susan, none of the links in this Pat Lang post seem to be working forme. Is it something at my end of the computer magic or are others having difficulty too?
Works for me. You have the most recent version of Adobe Acrobat loaded?
Yes, my adobe reader is up to date and other pdf links work fine.
For some reason my adobe reader just must have stopped beiong able to open pdf links from the web. So I uninstalled and then reinstalled and now all is well.
See if these links work
The Power Of Nightmares
I think the ones below are some transcripts
Part I
Part III
I’m not sure if any of these links are more helpful but they offer a good perspective if anyone hasn’t seen them yet. These are both from Common Dreams website
Thomm Hartman
‘The Power of Nightmares‘: Hyping Terror For Fun, Profit – And Power
Katrina vanden Heuvel
The Power of Nightmares
The reason it’s gone is because they decided to make a movie out of it and it had been submitted to one of the film festivals for funding which they got and are now in production as a feature film. They want to make some money on it so they are not showing it on the internet.
Not quite.
I read the producer/ director’s comments in a Q&A session at BBC.
The task of obtaining the rights for resale of countless archived footage and photos from countless sources will be very arduous and possibly quite expensive. (This is a hurdle faced by many documentarians.)
They want to release a DVD / VHS copy — and have received so many requests — that they may go through the difficult process to meet the demand.
(Yes, the series was shown at the Cannes Film Festival. I don’t know if has gotten distribution yet.)
Yes, I heard this from a friend that it was picked up at Cannes. But I haven’t read anything myself about it.
Now, you cant get it on the internet from LIMEWIRE or KAAZA. It’s on there.
…as The DaVinci Code is to Opus Dei. You don’t have to like either Straussians or Opus Dei to see that, while superficially clever, these are works of conspiratorial nonsense.
Strange.
Compare Power of Nightmares to, say, James Mann’s Rise of the Vulcans, which covers much the same ground (the emergence of Bush’s disastrous foreign policy team from the Nixon and, more significantly, Ford White House), but does so without positing — fancifully in my view — that this was some kind of Straussian conspiracy.
Don’t get me wrong. Straussians have been influential within Republican and conservative circles. But they are not the only influence on neoconservatism. Strauss is neither a necessary nor sufficient explanation for what’s happened to this country’s foreign policy. And his career is really not isomorphic to that of Said Qutb, as Power of Nightmares part I suggests (though, like so much else about PoN, it’s a potentially interesting comparison…but more so if one both acknowledges differences between Strauss and Qutb, and if one sees them both as examples of a broader opposition to modernity that one can see in a lot of postmodernist thought [I’m using “postmodernist” very broadly here]).
Finally, I think the notion that Al Qaeda is entirely a legal fiction invented in the United States strains credibility. Again, PoN is valuable because it raises interesting and important questions that have too often not been raised (and here I apologize somewhat for my Dan Brown analogy; The Davinci Code does not do this). But the answers PoN offers are too simplistic, and unnecessarily conspiratorial.
I more or less agree with Jonathan Raban’s critical appreciation of PoN in his omnibus review essay “The Truth About Terrorism” from the January 13, 2005 New York Review of Books. Here’s his gloss on PoN:
Power of Nightmares is at least a film that raises questions and makes some points that are fascinating speculation and at times common sense.
I have always believed, long before I saw PON that Al Queda is a myth. 19 hijackers….it was a one time affair. They had support of elements of perhpas some intelliigence agency but not the agency itself (Pakistan). They had some wealth behind them.
It isn’t like to happen again. Unless Bush keeps on asking for it.
There is neither the desire, the money, the manpower or the technology to do this again…..that’s why there have been only back packer attacks.
But one back pack attack here would validate Bush and send his poll numbers rising.
It seems to me that this is very likely to happen. He’s bound to rebound one way or another. I am afraid Patrick Fitzgerald is not enough.
You can download it on Lime Wire or Kaaza . Lime wire works really well with mac. I think Kaaza is for PC’s.
All three segments are available from T3 sources only takes about 1;;2 hour.
Interesting point! Ayn Rand, of course, did the same thing, and she’s back in fashion. I guess you can go a long way appealing to (what I consider) the worst in people. Real inspiration would be to hear about what’s good for America or good for Americans. I think the Dems hit that point well on some of the Sunday talk shows.
Thanks for your analysis of the analysis.
Nietszche posited that “strength” was the only virtue because strength was required for survival. Malthus posited that basically there wasn’t enough to go around for everyone and therefore we had to essentially take care of ourselves even if this meant doing so at the expense of our neighbors.
Ayn Rand’s contemporary shrine, the Cato Institute, routinely extolls the virtures of price gouging and the survival of the fittest, (as long as they themselves are the haves, not the have nots). And Strauss, like a typical cult leader claiming descent from Krishna or some other diety, elevates the superiority of his own doctrine of tyranny by claiming that the hoi polloi, (read, those who don’t follow him), are incapable of understanding reason or of utilizing knowledge efectively to bring about improvement in their own lives.
None of these ideological positions have anything to do with human growth, learning and enlightenment or the advance of civilization. None of them are in sync with the fundamental democracy=based idea that the only legitimate function of government is to serve, protect, and where possible to facilitate the improvement of the lives of (all) the people under it’s authority. None of these ideologies embraces the simple idea that profitting at the expense of your neighbor is usually not progress. And none of these flawed ideologies recognize that our greatest “strength” lies in our ability to work together for the common good, to engage in actions that lift all, not just the few at the expense of the many. All of these ideological constructs are designed to divide us against each other in one way or another rather than to unite us for the common good.
These totalitarian ideologies are the bane of civilization and have been for millennia. Each era brings another crop of narcissistic megalomaniacs, each of whom ignores history with impunity, settling instead for their delusion that their ideas are infallible. Cheney and his Jacobins, (as Pat Lang describes them), Grover Norquist and his cabal of “Mammon-crazed” looters and asset strippers, Tom DeLay and his gang of legislative branch crooks and swindlers and legbreakers, and the evangelical fascist leaders like dobson and Falwell, etc.; none of these creeps are advocates of democracy. All are aspiring tyrants, and there should be no room for them to have power over others in an enlightened Democratic society.
–At least within our branch. We’re evolved to be tribal–all our close relatives are.
As long as “thinkers” are going to cite mechanical and animal nature, they could at least recognize what it actually is.
It may actually be more correct to say that sociability–and not strength–is the only virtue, because only good sociability is really required for survival. Strength won’t buy you 2 extra seconds against a lion, or even a sneaky or large aggressor of your own kind–but a sizeable collection of friends could buy you an extra 20 years.
Screw life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, right? And the common defense, general welfare, blessings of liberty. I hope we can get their power away from them sooner rather than later. There is way too much pain and death to continue on this path a moment longer than we must.
Thanks for this concise, straight-up explanation. I haven’t read as much about these people as I would have liked, so to know their philosophical roots is interesting indeed. How ironic to use the religious right in a power-grab that begins with the one who proclaimed the death of God!
Hmm!
Well, a couple of things popped into my silly little head.
In industry we would not do a black or white analysis of a competitor’s future moves. WE would look at him from both perspectives…what he ought to do if he were smart like us, and we would overlay that with what he would do because he is dumb like he is. Because everybody thinks in two levels. At a minimum this tells us what he absolutely will do when the directions line up or what he won’t do. In the case of conflict it tells us what’s ambiguous and what can be changed through the use of strategic ‘influence.’ This works because there is a built in ‘out’ …that is, an alternate system of thought which can be used within his own political organization to justify a course correction .
The other thing that popped into my head is the use of data mining, which offers the manipulative analyst a much larger inventory of ingredients to bake the cake, or intel. Seems to me to be no accident of history that data mining and neocon OSP policy hijacking arose at about the same time. An executive lacking inquisitiveness and critical thinking skills might well be over impressed, or shall we say, willing to be overimpressed, with the type of linkages and correllations generated by this technique, without testing those correllations for a causal or even logical connection.
At what point along the development of this movement should a hypothetically healthy society have recognized what was up against it? Which sectors or forces in a heathy society should have been sounding alarms?
Given our big system of higher education, a natural place for me to look is to the scholars. But I don’t know anything relevant about government or intelligent systems to guess how or where any warnings should have arisen.
I’m guessing that the modern economy is just fine with all this.
The Big German Corporations all backed Hitler. He was good for business too, at least until they started losing the war.
This is a remarkable essay and I am grateful to your for having brought it to my attention. A couple of years ago Tristero drew my attention to the Drury article, which I have not read but kept in the card catalogue of my mind.
This is a truly great essay. Much to ponder and digest. I learned a lot from it.
Thanks for the excellent Habakkuk essay. A couple other things to note about Shulsky, Schmitt, and their take on intelligence…
First, Shulsky and Schmitt are also authors of Secret Warfare: Understanding the World of Intelligence, which has been one of the leading textbooks in the field for more than a decade and a half. I mention this not at all to defend S&S — about whom I largely agree with Habukkuk — but simply to point out that their influence is deep and goes back long before this administration, or even the founding of PNAC.
Second, many of S&S’s arguments in their essay can best be understood as slightly vulgarized versions of stereotypical Straussian intellectual moves. Let me give you two examples.
Habakkuk effectively notes the many ways in which S&S misrepresent and misunderstand Kent. But he doesn’t quite explain why S&S do these things…nor why they choose as their opponent someone writing half a century earlier. In fact, mid-century American social science has long been one of the bêtes noirs of the Straussians. To get a sense of what S&S are really up to in their critique of Kent, one could do worse than read Herbert Storing (ed), Essays on the Scientific Study of Politics (1962), the most exhaustive Straussian attack on then contemporary political science. There one will find many of the distortions that Habakkuk notes in the S&S essay (incidentally, for a famous, early critique of Straussianism, check out Sheldon Wolin and John Shaar’s very long review of this book in American Political Science Review 57 (1963): 125-50).
Although one can easily find fault with the Straussian critique of mid-century social science, that they were critiquing it made sense when this critique was actually developed…in the 1950s and early 1960s. Now, decades later, as is often the case in the work of some Straussians, a critique that was once at least timely, appears in S&S as a kind of intellectual unfrozen caveman.
A second example of S&S’s peculiar relationship to Strauss is their insistence on a “Straussian” reading of Khomeini. There is no question that Strauss’s notion of the exoteric and esoteric meanings of texts lies at the heart of the way he came to interpret works of political philosophy. However problematic this view was, it was limited pretty explicitly to philosophical works. S&S seem to promote this peculiar reading strategy as a way to understand the world in toto. Should we really be reading political statements by Khomeini the same way we would read works of political philosophy? I think even Strauss would have said “no.”