HerbEly

Hamas: Another Intelligence Failure

Patrick Lang lets loose a pointed comment occasioned by Condolezza Rice's admission that the administration was caught off guard by Ham's election victory in Palestine. It is but one more case of a pattern of institutionalized denial - a topic of this blog for too long. Col. Lang is skeptical that the intelligence reforms will have any impact:

The intelligence people?  They were made into moral eunuchs years ago and now are too involved in the intricacies of the "kowtow" to say anything distracting and awkward.

I have been rebuked in the past for my lack of faith in the efficacy of the "reforms" carried  out in the intelligence community in the last few years.  I will say again that real intelligence reform is a matter of the spirit not of bureaucracy.

I agree. It is presumptuous of me to write this but one does begin to feel like a voice crying in the wilderness.

Conference on Intelligence Ethics

NYT reporter Scott Shane's Shane’s front page story on this conference included some interesting quotes:

“Less dramatic but more common ethical choices come routinely to intelligence analysts, who must decide each day what gets reported to policy makers. Melvin A. Goodman, a C.I.A. analyst from 1966 to 1990, is speaking at the conference on his experience with the politicization of intelligence during the cold war, which he believes has been echoed in the Iraq war.
"My feeling is that every problem with the intelligence in the run-up to the war was an ethical question," from the handling of the dubious defector code-named Curveball to the cherry-picking of evidence on Iraq's nuclear program, Mr. Goodman said.
"There's a lot of pandering at the C.I.A.," with the White House being given intelligence reports that suit known policy preferences, he said.”

It is not clear why he never mentioned the conference organizers or gave a link to the Joint Services Commission on Professional Ethics. For details on the intelligence ethics conference and follow up info go here.

Change the Analytic Culture to Fix Intelligence: Part II

Back on August 29, 2004 I linked to a WaPo story on fixing the analytic culture. Now US News and World Report tells us that the CIA has recognized the same issue.

But since 2003, at least three unclassified CSI reports--all critical of the agency--have been withheld from the CIA's website, U.S. News has learned. During that same time, the agency has placed online three other CSI (i.e Center for Study of Intelligence) reports, all of those relatively positive or neutral.

Among the documents withheld: a tough 69-page report, "Curing Analytic Pathologies."The study, published quietly in December, argues that reform efforts have centralized authority but failed to change the intelligence community's core problem--"dysfunctional behaviors and practices within the individual agencies." A second report, "Analytic Culture in the U.S. Intelligence Community," was published last May and found the nation's intelligence analysts isolated and lacking overseas experience and training in research techniques. A third report, "Intelligence for a New Era in American Foreign Policy," from 2004, is the record of an unclassified conference of intelligence veterans, several of whom made comments sharply critical of the intelligence community.

I contacted the CIA for copies of these reports and got this reply:

To obtain the reports, please contact the Center for the Study of Intelligence at 1-703-613-1753, or order through government publication vendors listed on CSI's website at www.cia.gov.

I've made the phone call and am waiting for the reports.

The impact of organizational culture can be profound and disastrous. Look here for some info on a NASA study on the contribution of corporate culture to the Columbia shuttle disaster.

I'm not sure what any of us can do about this, but we should all acknowledge our part in shaping the culture and keeping it healthy. This may be the primary duty of top level leaders.

Benedict XVI Surprises Main Stream Media

Both the Washington Post and the New York Times are surprised by the tone and content of Pope Benedict XVI’s first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est.

They needn’t have been. As posted here on April 21, 2005, the Pope’s change in focus is one more example of Miles’s corollary to the famous American proverb, Murphy’s law. As Miles put it: “Where you stand depends on where you sit.” No one should have been surprised that Cardinal Ratzinger would change his focus after his position was changed.

This encyclical has much to say about two of my three favorite topics: marital spirituality and politics and religion. It has less to say about the third: workplace spirituality. This is unfortunate. By creating wealth, business can lift people out of poverty. It is business activity that has enabled this country to increase its life expectancy by 40 years since 1930. Business activity built the internet which the Vatican is using to distribute this encyclical.

I’ve written elsewhere that too many spiritual writers (and academics) look down on business activity as morally inferior. Yet, I must acknowledge that I’ve spent little time looking at church documents on this issue. Looks like I have some work to do.

Challenging Institutionalized Ignorance

    This morning’s news scan spotted three stories about the the ability of insitutions to ignore and deny unpleasant reality for long periods of time:

• Steven Perlstein  reports on Ford Motor Company’s need to radically change its thinking in order to save itself. (As a former owner, I observe that Taurus, transmission and turkey all begin with the letter “t”
• National Catholic Reporter  editorializes on how the Los Angeles diocesan newspaper soft pedals the tendency of bishops to transfer serial pedophiles from on parish to another.
• Even though it has known for a long time that warfare is declining and changing , the Pentagon’s Quadrenniel Defense Review has yet to adapt it’s plans.

In the biblical days we people who challenged the institutional mindset were called prophets and were persecuted. Now they are called whistleblowers and they just get fired – or sued. This is progress, I suppose.

Three Seemingly Unrelated Stories

This morning I was struck by three stories in the WaPo. The first concerns ineffective warnings about Hurricane Katrina; the second, tragically inept law enforcement; and the third, potential improvements by Washington Redskins coach Joe Gibbs. These stories are related, I suggest, by a common theme: the crucial importance of workplace spirituality.

Catholic Carnival LXIII

Catholic Carnival is back after Jay has recovered from a horrendus computer meltdown. Thanks Jay and welcome back.

SPIRITUAL DIRECTION: Explore a Closer Relationship with God

(Note: As I result of encouragement by friends and colleagues, I am now offering spiritual direction in the Charlottesville, VA area. The following is from my flyer:

A spiritual director serves as a companion in your journey. By listening and helping you to reflect on your experience a director helps you to:

® Find ways of developing a closer relationship with God, who personally cares about your well-being and happiness
® Seek God’s help in finding a safe path through the difficulties of everyday life
® Align your actions with God’s will so that you can be a positive influence in this world.

TRAINING AND EXPERIENCE

Great Post on "Lost"

Go over to Amy Welborn's Open Book for posting and comments about the TV show. Even after the comments, I'm still sticking with the purgatory and reconciliation theory.

Marcus Vick: Culturally Supported Insanity

Former Virginia Tech quarterback Marcus Vick has, finally, been dismissed after a long string of traffic vilolations, misdemeanors, and unsportsmanlike conduct. This is insanity as Ben Franklin defined it – “doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”

Now Washington Post sports writer John Feinstein places Vick’s string of violations in a broader context

All of which brings us to an issue that goes well beyond the troubles of Marcus Vick. His story reflects a much larger problem at all levels of sports: the existence of a place that we might call, for want of a better term, "The Land of Never Wrong."