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On The Use of Intelligence by Policymakers
The three panel members all commented favorably on the overall utility of intelligence to US policymakers. They also identified some weak spots. Former Secretary Cheney noted that "when I arrived at the Defense Department…the floodgates had opened. There was this enormous volume of material, and I had to find some way to…reduce it to manageable proportions." Although CIA’s reports were "very good," according to Mr. Cheney, he also valued briefings from experts in the academic world as well as from CIA and other intelligence agencies on "what does this mean…[and] what should we be thinking about, and so forth." He added, "I think [the Bush Administration] was very, very well served on balance— that we got a lot of excellent analysis, a lot of it thought-provoking, that required us to really think about what we were doing and why."
Panelists (left to right): Richard Cheney, Brent Scowcroft, William Webster.
General Scowcroft observed that decisionmakers often are faced with "ambiguity and lack of hard data;" thus, a key purpose of intelligence is to provide some key "concrete facts." And, he added, consumers generally have confidence in intelligence experts’ facts and interpretations of those facts, but they tend to be more skeptical when it comes to intelligence officers’ predictions. Judge Webster made a related point, noting that policymakers may be interested in our predictions but often will give preference to their own. Partly for this reason, according to the Judge, he found "a very clear preference among policymakers for current intelligence rather than Estimates." Webster also noted that it can be very difficult to obtain the human intelligence that is often the only way to get at our adversaries’ intentions. General Scowcroft identified some other problems, such as analysts’ "mind- sets" and the tendency to assume that foreign leaders reason as we do. These phenomena, he indicated, caused US intelligence to fail to forecast the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. |