Over the last several days and weeks leading up to the election, the news feed on my Facebook page had been a Santa’s Scroll of political spew, a seemingly unending roll of pictures, quotes, graphs, and jokes – from Obama the Witch Doctor to Romnazis – very little of it illuminating, nearly all of it sportive ruminating. Normally this sort of horse-race bloodlust is just my game, and I’ve linked and posted and commented and liked my fair share, but the stories and pictures from the East Coast following Hurricane Sandy made it all seem unimportant. For a little while at least, looking through the admittedly tiny lens of Facebook, it appeared that people were taking off their R and D team jerseys and instead worrying about friends and family and loved ones. Campaigns stopped their campaigning, pollsters stopped their polling, and in the face of extreme circumstance we found our better selves.
Too bad it didn’t last.
Nope, the right-wing pundit class wasted no time after the election getting back to spilling printed pus and blogged bile across the media landscape. They’re back to the issue that they thought would win the day before, and for some reason they still think will bring down the president. Libya.
On the Sunday before the election, Sen. John McCain called the ongoing situation “the worst cover-up I’ve ever seen” and suggested the president wasn’t qualified to be commander-in-chief. During the second presidential debate, an exchange over what event the phrase “acts of terror” referred to in a speech launched a torrent of fact-checking, fuck-that-checking and to-hell-with-you-checking. The problem is that McCain knew this was untrue, and Romney didn’t care what’s true. McCain knows – as does Sen. Lindsey Graham (another recent critic) – that intelligence reports change as the intelligence coming in describes an evolving situation. The Republicans are demanding something they know cannot be produced in the manner they claim to want. This continued charade of indignance is nothing more than the carrying through of the first commandment of Rovianity, “Thou shalt attack thy enemy’s strength.” The GOP has spied an issue that they are feverishly trying to politicize to help their man, all the while denouncing the injection of politics into the issue. They know because during the lead-up to the war in Iraq, they were defending the intelligence community in the same way that Pres. Obama is now. They know intelligence gathering and analysis is a tricky business through their experience on the Armed Services committee at the very least. I know intelligence reporting is a tricky business because it used to be my business.
My last two years in the Air Force as a cryptologic linguist were spent attached to the 22nd Intelligence Squadron at Ft. Meade, Maryland. I was assigned to a duty section within the National Security Agency and spent those years collecting signals intelligence and writing reports based on that intelligence. When I first started working within NSA, what struck me most was the sheer volume of raw material that we would collect. The unofficial motto in the intel field was “In God we trust, all others we monitor.” This is apt, and the amount of information, while certainly a valuable thing, required time and manpower to go through and look for specific events or people or anything of value to US interests. We would have certain targets and things that we were specifically looking for, but also had to be ready to collect new information. My target wasn’t “sexy,” which was a term used to describe the kind of stuff you see talked about in movies and such, but it still followed the same general pattern. A report is written based on present information, and as new information comes in from whatever source, that report may need to be revisited and reassessed. This reassessment and reissuing of reports based on changing conditions was the norm, not the exception. While there is cooperation and communication between reporting offices, the intelligence community is fairly closed, meaning you don’t always know what happens to the reports that you send out. Everything is based on the two concepts that give some access to classified information: the security clearance and a “need to know.” Nearly everyone had the same clearance, but the “need to know” part kept everything in its small place, I often had no idea what someone working on a different target a few cubicles over was doing.
This is an important point in regard to the current controversy. Senators, Congressmen, and the wingnut on the street is clamoring for more information, more facts, more more more. Much of what is being used to discover for certain what happened when is deeply sensitive, involving overlapping missions and targets, and to just hand it over in public or broadcast it would be unthinkable in terms of the damage it could do to ongoing missions that, in some cases, could have been years in the making. It also could impede efforts to gather new information that could help fill out the picture of what happened in Benghazi on 9/11/2012. That’s the real point here, is that when attempting to fill out the full story, the full truth of what happened when for absolute certain, you’re talking about what was happening inside, outside, among the groups, the entire narrative from all viewpoints and all sides. The picture is a puzzle, not a snapshot, no matter how much people shout and demand a Polaroid-type report that comes out as it happens in true focus. It will take until long after the election to learn all of the, as Donald Rumsfeld would say, “unknown unknowns” regarding this incident. The Right knows this as well, but would rather have you believe that either the President himself or someone speaking for him is blatantly lying to us. Why do they insist on it being a lie? Because of the reporting they have received so far, but that reporting is still in flux and also one must understand that what the press and the public is being told has been through several sets of eyes and hands.
Intel reports are interesting to read, because often they are trying to say things while retaining some amount of wiggle room at the same time. Everyone knows that the situation is fluid, and no one wants to be pinned down later (Cheney’s aluminum tubes anyone?) so you end up with reports full of qualifiers such as “apparently,” “it seems that,” “conditions imply,” that sort of thing. Whatever the CIA (or NSA) reports to the President has been filtered before it gets to him through several other people – he rarely sees the raw reports, the raw intel, nor should he have to sift through it all. So what the President says to the press or to us is his version of someone else’s version of some raw intelligence that came out a few days after the event when someone else picked up, heard, intercepted, read, saw the event in question. I for one would always, regardless of party, bet against the President of the United States blatantly lying.
The problem with the public accounting of what happens in regards to intelligence reports is when spokespeople go out and talk about them – the vagueness in the original report is often dropped, so something akin to “conditions imply that it may possibly have been something that could be seen as a protest leading to the attack” becomes “a protest led to the attack.” This is unfortunate, but they on one hand are trying to get out as much as possible as succinctly as possible, and they also understand that if pressed they can go back and put the qualifiers back in and c their a. This is more about media manipulation and message driving than lying for some mal intent, but in a 24-hour news cycle that is on its way to 12 this is how things go amongst the tweets, blogs, sites, papers, and channels that are all trying to have the goods first.
The knee-jerk reactions and pundit prognosticators will always be a thorn in the side of methodical, measured, and prudent intelligence gathering. There will be those who want to know NOW and will make up what they are not given. But we must always remember the past, for it’s there we often see the present in its starkest relief, and the lead-up to and launch of the war in Iraq should tell us all we need to know in terms of being very careful that we have the right information before we set events in motion that could ripple their effects for years to come. The Bush administration was right in that we don’t want to find a smoking gun in the form of a mushroom cloud. But as long as the greatest intelligence gathering apparatus in the world is allowed to do its important business in a way that puts our interests and our security ahead of our impatience, hopefully we will never have to.