verging_on_random

Intelligence sources have revealed …

January 12, 2007 on 3:45 pm | In Uncategorized |

From time to time you read comments from somebody to the effect that mere mortal folk like us shouldn’t question our betters on important matters of national security. Unlike us, the argument goes, our national leaders have access to all the secret intelligence reports. They know the truth about the world scene, the dreadful secrets that can’t be disclosed to the rest of us because … well just because, OK? What’s the point of having intelligence agencies if you don’t have lots of big secrets?

People who think like this have watched too many of the wrong kind of spy movies I reckon. You know the kind … the head of MI5 lifts the green telephone that hasn’t been used since the Profumo affair … “Prime Minister I need to see you immediately … yes our agent in Moscow has uncovered a plot to assassinate the Queen … for god’s sake don’t tell anyone, our agent’s life will be put in deadly peril.” People who think real life is like this are everywhere; one owns Harrod’s in London . Their lives must be miserable, worrying about all those unknown plots that their worthy leaders are busy dealing with. One imagines John Howard in his office after midnight, poring over the latest secret briefings from ASIS with a worried frown. “Get me Lord Downer on the scrambler,” he tells his secretary … “Lexie have you seen this top secret warning that the president of Iran doesn’t like Israel? Oh it’s in The Australian is it? Well it’s still a worry.”

The ‘leave it to those in the know’ brigade are amongst the worryingly large number of people who seem incapable of reflecting intelligently on the past. I mean we have plenty of evidence that our leaders don’t spend any time studying and evaluating intelligence data. They don’t study or evaluate any bloody thing. To whit:

• The 16 US intelligence agencies produced a combined report that found, as a matter of fact, that the Iraq invasion and occupation had increased the risk of terrorism. Howard said he hadn’t read it. It was ‘another contribution to the debate’, he said.
• The Stern Report, commissioned by the British Treasury, found that the cost of not taking action to reverse global warming would far exceed the cost of doing it. Howard said he ‘wasn’t convinced by the science’. No, he hadn’t read the report.
• Laughing Phil Ruddock has been defending the government’s refusal to do anything about David Hicks’ imprisonment in a concentration camp for years, but it emerged this week that he’s never bothered to read the brief of evidence that the prosecution will rely on.
• The defence offered by Downer, Vaile, Howard and anybody else involved in the AWB scandal was that they didn’t know what was going on. Yes, they admitted that they might have seen some cables from embassy staff but they didn’t remember. Downer got quite terse about it … like he’s a busy man, doncha know? He can’t be expected to sit and read piles of intelligence reports.

In short, our leaders don’t have the time (or perhaps the inclination) to study and interpret intelligence data. For god’s sake, half the US Congress still can’t explain the difference between Sunnis and Shiites. All politicians want is summaries of intelligence, from which they pick and choose points to support their preferred course of action. Anybody who doubts this is really not living in the reality-based world.

Today’s intelligence triumph reveals that Osama bin Laden is in … go on, guess. Which country do you reckon old Osama’s in?

Well done everybody who said ‘Pakistan’. It’s official, just been announced today.

I confess to having been under the impression since 2001 that Al Qaeda’s headquarters (to the extent they have one) moved back and forth between Pakistan and Afghanistan. I thought everyone knew that, even without having access to secret intelligence reports. That’s where they hatch their evil schemes, though I don’t really understand how you can plan to bomb the London underground from a cave in the hills outside Quetta.

Anyway now that Al Qaeda’s whereabouts are a known known, what is the Bush administration going to do about it? I mean they’ve invaded Afghanistan and Iraq as part of the War On Terror but Pakistan’s supposed to be an ally. Sending in a few special forces to hunt down Osama and his mates should be a piece of cake.

Except apparently this isn’t possible. Nobody is explaining why not. No doubt the reasons lie in that top secret ‘President Bush’s eyes only’ report from Our Man in Lahore.