Letter to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Last Tuesday, June 24, Martha Ezzard, an editorial writer and columnist for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, wrote a column drawing on a book (Silent Warfare: Understanding the World of Intelligence) I co-authored with current Pentagon official Abram Shulsky. The article ("As Intelligence Devolves, Truth Changes Shape") suggests we believe intelligence need not be objective and that, in some fashion, we provide the intellectual grounds for the administration's alleged skewing of intelligence over Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

In response, I wrote a letter to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that spelled out how Ms. Ezzard had herself skewed the contents of Silent Warfare. The AJC letters' editor, Lynn Anderson, refused to publish the letter, arguing that it was too long. Over numerous e-mail exchanges with Ms. Anderson, I agreed to cut the letter by more than 50%. In the end, she continued to refuse to run even the much briefer letter, now down to little more than 200 words, saying it would have to be cut by 100 more. The bottom line: the Atlanta Journal-Constitution feels free to run columns that mislead their readers but is not interested in letters that attempt to set the record straight.

What follows is the letter as originally sent to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

"Martha Ezzard's recent column ("As Intelligence Devolves, Truth Changes Shape," June 24, 2003) uses material from a book I co-authored with Abram Shulsky (Silent Warfare: Understanding the World of Intelligence) to suggest that we advocate shading intelligence to fit a president's preferred policy position. She then goes on to say that, since Mr. Shulsky works in the Pentagon and I run a think-tank that supported President Bush's decision to go to war with Iraq that this "leads credence to the charge that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld manipulated intelligence to build a case for war."

"I will let Secretary Rumsfeld defend himself. However, she misreads Silent Warfare. To cut to the heart of the matter, Ms. Ezzard conflates the important issue of how best to make intelligence analysis relevant to policymakers' decision-making with the problem of policymakers' pressuring intelligence analysts to provide "cooked" assessments, i.e., analysis changed or shaded to fit an administration's policy. Take the following simple example: before a military campaign begins meteorologists working in the armed forces will be asked to provide estimates of what the weather will be like over a particular place at a particular time, not just what the weather will be in general. The estimates must be relevant to the planning of the campaign to be of value. In contrast, just because a general wants to start his campaign on a given day, we don't want the meteorologists saying the weather is going to be "fair and blue skies" when he knows that is not likely to be the case. As Mr. Shulsky and I make clear in the very chapter Ms. Ezzard cites, an "important function" of intelligence officials is "pointing out areas in which [a given] policy is not working or has become inappropriate." Intelligence analysts must also "counteract" pressures to become "cheerleaders for current policies." And, to do so, intelligence "must have enough independence to withstand the pressures such a situation generates."

"Finally, Ms. Ezzard writes that, if the current speculation about intelligence on Iraq's weapons program being politicized were to be true, that I don't believe that this is any of the public's business. This is a distortion of my phone conversation with her. What I did say was that the congressional intelligence committees were the appropriate bodies to determine whether that was true or not and public hearings would only be useful after our elected representatives charged with overseeing sensitive intelligence matters had looked at this issue. Getting to the bottom of this matter requires examining not only the analysis provided the administration but also the secret sources and methods used to come up with those assessments. That cannot be done in public, a fact I'm sure most Americans understand completely."