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I have no real reason to intercede in Marcy’s argument with Marc Ambinder, but I just want to take up one point. Marc wrote:
And yet — we, too, weren’t privy to the intelligence. Information asymmetry is always going to exist, and, living as we do in a Democratic system, most journalists are going to give the government the benefit of some doubt, even having learned lessons about giving the government that benefit.
I’m going to leave that last part aside for a second and focus on the first — the "we, too, weren’t privy to the intelligence." It’s a fairly important part of Marc’s point, because it establishes the epistemic premise that there’s an extant body of facts that will adjudicate the truth or falsity of the claims at stake that lead to either the conclusion This threat is politicized or This threat warrants a rise in the terror alert. Without access to this body of information, journalists have little choice but to seek adjudication through other sources; or to accept ambiguity.
The trouble is the premise is false. Intelligence is rarely, if ever, definitive. It’s fragmentary and subject to interpretation. Talk to anyone who’s handled raw intelligence and s/he will tell you something on the order of this: "I thought it would be like a secret newspaper, but instead what’s already available in open-source materials is often more useful." Rarely is there ever a clear policy option "implied" by intelligence — that’s a category error. Policymakers read intelligence, use it or discount it in whole or in part, and then make decisions. Intelligence is a text to be interpreted, not a compass pointing to true north. What’s more, those who acquire and analyze intelligence on a discrete subject use the same body of open-source information to shape their judgments as the rest of us do.
Which implies choices for journalists. We can choose to treat intelligence as more definitive than it is and enable the presumption of deference to those who say, Well, if only you saw the intelligence I saw… Or we can choose to treat intelligence-based claims as valuable but not definitive, and contextualize such claims within larger bodies of evidence.
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Spencer, Spencer, Spencer . . .
“Choices for journalists”? How are you ever going to make it as a DC-based journalist with posts like this?
/s
So, basically, what you’re saying is that Marc Ambinder is an asshole and a poor journalist? Well, I’m not privy to the all the same information as you, but I’d say that his above linked post is enough to reach that conclusion fairly, just as I reached the conclusion that the terror alerts were politicized years ago.
I’d argue that open source information is more reliable than the stuff acquired by spooks. Informants almost always have a fish to fry and rarely give accurate information. Ahmed Chalabi is the star witness. At least in open source information, there’s some possibility that someone has done some vetting, or at least you know where it came from (even if it’s only “admin sources”) and can assign a credibility index to it and look for confirmation of denial in addtional data. At least that’s how I figured out in a couple of months that there were no WMD in Iraq.
And then there is the stovepiped crap that idiots like Feith produce to please their masters like Cheney.
Oh, yeah. Journalists are so much more fun to argue about than God.
“Damn, all these alleged facts and suppositions make my head hurt.
The path of least resistance is so convenient – look, the ‘truth’ just rolled in over teh FAX.”
The history of the threat alerts and their veracity becomes part of the intelligence for observers.
Even if I were to accept Ambinder’s explanation for why he was such a tool then, it still doesn’t explain why he is such a tool now.
Oh come on now! That would be like work and require thinking and that would be hard. We can’t ask that of our elite press corpse.
one way to address this problem is to have an explicit “government announcements” section, where journos and anchors make it clear that they are not reporting on the info but, for that moment, just relaying it unchallenged in the form it was given to them by government agencies for the purpose of public dissemination. Thus, it’ll be perfectly clear who cried wolf.
Yaeh, and you can’t spell journalists backwards and get dog, either . . *G*
Ah, yes, the Office of Special Plans, which only wanted the stuff, true or not, they could use to justify invading Iraq. PNAC Central.
Useful intelligence is generally analysis of all available information, which, hopefully, is then sent on to the people who need it. I love using the CIA’s World Fact Book website. It has lots of information that they’ve collected together from publicly available sources in one well-formatted place.
Information of the form of “if I told how I know this, I’d have to kill you” is something I take as being BS, and I’d say I’m right more often than not. If you don’t know where information came from, you have no idea whether it’s true without corroboration, which means it’s not much use to me in any case.
WE could also require our elite (sic) journalists to actually earn their exorbitant and obviously overinflated salaries.
Ambinder: “We weren’t privy to the intelligence.”
The problem here is that even if Ambinder and his fellow journalists had access to the intelligence, there is no assurance that said intelligence would be worth the paper it was printed on. Let’s remember that we live in a nation where our highest government officials couldn’t correctly determine whether or not Iraq had nuclear weapons. Or worse, they lied about what they knew. In either case, the “intelligence” that might have informed Ambinder’s writing about the validity of the terror alerts was useless by definition.
One of most heinous crimes committed by the Bush administration is that their devious methodology created a “boy who cried wolf” situation, whereby we don’t know what is believable and what isn’t. Thus we are stuck in a rotten, cynical place where eternal skepticism is the only sensible posture for the citizenry to take. Not a happy state of affairs….
There really are a few kinds of secret intelligence which are significantly value added. These include documents illegally transferred to spies by agents working in the host country, photographs and other information from spy satellites, and various other forms of information intercepts. Even here, the information is often ambiguous and requires interpretation and evaluation.
“Hey, Honey – I Tivo’d George Will for you this morning. Here’s the remote, and a legal pad so you can start your column. Ramos Fizz?”
well ..imo .. it’s a simple task to always approach the gub’mint “story” with more skepticism than blind trust .. and that’s a view easily reinforced by a simple review of history .. governments always want to put out a given story line .. whether it was hitler trumping up so-called attacks on ethnic germans to justify the invasion of poland .. or LBJ frothing up the “attack” on the turner joy .. or GWB and company pumping up the nookleer threat and WMD’s in iraq ..
i simply see modern journalists like ambinder as being severly lacking in skepticism .. and maybe a bit lazy too .. like the poster above said “hey why dig [work]..when the ‘truth’ just came in over the fax” ..
but truly .. it’s not an issue of trust at all is it ?? it’s allowing ones’ political philosophy to influence ones’ decisions as to “who to trust” ..
and it’s especially stupid …imo .. when ambinder has already said .. “i give them the benefit of the doubt ..even after having been taught better than to give them that benefit” ..
what part of the old “fool me once” ..etc ..irish proverb does marc fail to grasp ?? i don’t think he fails to grasp it .. i think he allows his political slant to influence the facts he’d like to present ..
IOW .. he’s a partisan politial hack whose interests are to publish a given narrative to reinforce his political views ..and not an objective journalist seeking to find and publish the truth .. publishing the truth might harm his access ..or his invation list ..
he’s deserves anything marcy deals him .. imo .. he’s practicing yellow journalism ..
here’s the point that marc missses spence, it’s the biggest point of all;
we aleady knew the president was a liar, we already knew he took us into Iraq on lies, we already knew he diverted assets FROM the fight against terrorists so that he could attack Iran AND we already knew he wanted to attack Iran since before he even got into office, we already knew cheney, rumsfeld, wolfowitze were members of the sick and maniacle fraternity calling themselves a “project” of some sort and that wanted to attack Iran for no reason at all under clinton
in addition, in just about every case we found out what the terror alert was about just days after that alert and it was always a joke
we found out terrorists wanted to “flood wall street by collapsing the tunnel” and things like that, we found it out right then and there there was no terror issue at all.
marc would have done very niceley to simply ignore the book, the author made the claim before
marc needs to walk away from this, he blew it and there’s no way to walk it back
Really, Marc Ambinder. You weren’t privy to the information I could find by using the great Googles machine on a daily basis? Then, pray tell, why exactly should anyone give anything you say any kind of credence at all? If all I wanted from my so-called journalists was a presidential ass-licking, I would have listened solely to Jeff Gannon.
Not only was his initial column exceedingly ineffectual, porous, and just plain lame, his follow-ups only underscored his basic unwillingness to say quite plainly, “I was an idiot. I f***ed up. I am sorry” without him defending himself by attacking the liberals and our “gut hatred” of W. At least his own readers excoriated him in the comments.
Why is it called intelligence?
And, anyone who heard Scott Ritter screaming his head off in 2001-2003 knew there were excellent reasons to distrust the claims about Iraqi WMD. Not that difficult, Marc.
Isn’t this place called the blogosphere? And really as the saying goes, the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. The internet just makes it possible to do in real time.
I am a cultural anthropologist who occasionally teaches the field methods class. One of the first things I tell students is never trust anyone or anything totally (including your own perceptions). Seek outside verification of everything. Everybody lies sometimes and some people do it all the time. Everybody has biases and a particular perspective and even if they think it is true, that does not mean that it is. People also tell you what you want to hear, make things up so they don’t look stupid, an evade or distort to make themselves look better. I would hope journalists would be aware of these basic facts of human nature.
True, but I’m looking at it from the point of view of someone who is being asked to trust it. I know that sometimes it will be right, or at least analysts will figure out what it means correctly. Hell, random chance would guarantee that.
What I’m saying is, if I don’t know how it was obtained, I have no reason to trust it. Odds are that I’ll be right more often than wrong.
I think this is true, applied to almost everything.
Eternal skepticism is always the only sensible posture for any rational being.
For the same reason shit is called fertilizer.
As I said, there is always an element of ambiguity in all information.
Looks like I owe you a frosty beverage of your choice, sir.
Earlier this evening Jeremy Scahill tweeted “Journalists are not supposed to be stenographers for the powerful.”
I say that’s a good place to start….over.
I don’t believe you.
*g*
Documents can be forged. Remember the Iranian laptop? And if spy satellites were so great, how come they always got it wrong?
Ambinder must be reading the ferocious response to his original post and is wondering WTF? How could I possibly have touched off this firestorm with a few remarks on a blog? What I hope he understands when the smoke has cleared is that he managed to encapsulate everything that is wrong with establishment journalism in just a few paragraphs. He is probably having a hard digesting all this shit and making sense of it, because his world view is defined by the conventions of DC journalism, and it’s not an easy trick to yank yourself out of your own bubble and “get it.” I hope he succeeds.
You! People here and in my world may get tired of me speaking of context, but biases are part of that. Our perceptions are filtered and when we are aware of that, we can see more clearly. I think. I could be full of shit, of course, because of my filters, experience, biases.
I would argue that cultural anthropology should be mandatory for journalists.
And well you shouldn’t unless you can get some sort of independent confirmation (including the absence of any solid reason to doubt my statement).
Re: Peterr at 32
As I said, there is always ambiguity. Even if they are not overtly false, they represent what the author believes is true, which may or may not be factual.
I intend to eventually collect in person, sir.
I wonder if anyone has gone back and looked at administration officials citing ”increased chatter”, and done a time-line on same, or done a timeline on admin. raising of alert levels.
Even without an iota of inside intel, patterns of official and ”leaked” statements about elevated threat could be assessed.
I doubt, therefore I am.
–Rene Descartes’ next door neighbor
here’s the funny thing about those satalites ecahn;
we can count the hair on a mans arm with our satalites but we could not show one picture of wmd’s nor of anyone moving wmd’s
I remeber during the run up to the war, plenty of people would say, “perris, you don’t know the danger they know”
and my response was always;
“we can count the hair on a mans arm with our satalites, if they can’t show us a photograph then you can rest assured, no such weapons exist”
seems so brutally clear doesn’t it, now in hindsite it seems even more clear to people I discuss this with yet at the time they ignored that simple reality, there were no pictures of weapons of mass destruction, not one
Very good. We have some very tasty local microbrews here, if I may say so.
That along with 4 martini lunches, tight pants or short skirts and a lot of ass kissing. Oops. Sounding cranky, am I?
Words to live by. I only fear those whose lives are guided by fixed certainty for they are stark raving bonkers and totally clueless.
Hugh,
Thanks for the response. Surely eternal skepticism is the sensible posture, but it comes with a price. A society which is so deeply cynical that it’s literally impossible to feel good about anything its government does is a fundamentally ill society (see Soviet Union, 1950-1990.) I’m old enough and corny enough to want to believe in the fundamental righteousness of our government. We can’t afford to raise generations of kids who think that their government is rotten to the core, and that is the tragedy of the Bush years, which gave us so many reasons to doubt and fear.
Cultural Anthro. should be mandatory for everyone.
Kirkegaard lived beside Descartes? Cool.
I actually had a journalism student (double major with anthro) in my class the last time I taught it and she seemed to think it was useful in both fields.
I used to love hearing the reports come in;
“we found VANS OF MASS DESTRUCTION!!!…horayyy!!! we were RIFHT, see?”
to which those very people who found those “vans of mass destruction” were the same people who said these were NOT vans of mass destruction
then those “aluminum tubes of mass destruction” to which everyone said;…”errrr…no, these cannot be used for the purpose the adminstration claims they are used”
and what about that “balsa wood drone of mass destruction”…of course days later we found out this was a prop plane, line of site remote control, so unsophisticated your nephew has a better “drone of mass destruction” that he built from a hobby store, and this “balsa wood drone of mass destruction” was in such disrepair they held it together with DUCT tape
and corporate media was silent
I drink, therefore I am.
– W.C. Fields
I raised my kids saying When you encounter someone who says and acts like they know everything, run away. Run away fast and think for yourself.
Yes. A high point of my education was studying Cultural Anthro from Dr. Stewart McCrae, whom I consider one step away from a living God.
socrates;
“to be is to do”
frank sinatra;
‘do be do be dooooo”
fred flintstone;
“yaba daba doooo”
I want to go to school with you…
My cultural anthropology teacher in college, yes, I still remember, taught us with a goal of widening our acceptance of tolerable behavior. Wow, the stuff he showed and told us in that vein was searing.
I think it’s always wise to be skeptical. It’s the only hope we have of finding out what’s true.
Being cynical is rather sad, although I have to admit I’ve been feeling moreso recently.
“I’m wealthy, therefore, I am.” Bernard Madoff
Come on down. Actually, I should come on out to your school.
(PS, we’re practicing a song for tomorrow morning right now…Jesus On The Mainline…Arrowsmith’s Tyler did a very groovy version, on youtube. Have a really hot slide guitarist, professional, but could use a bass player, if you happen to know one.)
I’ve read a lot of books about the spook business, maybe a score, and every time they come to a wrong CIA decision, since the U-2, the author has to explain why the CIA analyst did not understand the information collected from the air. I think it’s worthless. Ditto the collection of everyone’s telephone calls and email. Those however, have a very definite use: blackmailing your political opponent.
Heh. He was apparently as good at fooling the women romantically as he was about fooling his clients of both genders.
My late husband once had a T-shirt printed up: Coitus Ergo Sum.
I think you’re right, but it’s worse than that…I think many Americans have felt that way since the Kennedy assassination and the Vietnam War. Bush was simply the worst, most recent outbreak of a disease this country has suffered for a long time.
You should here my lectures on gender and sexuality.
Well, sounds like you had a good one. Personally, I have great respect for cultural/social anthropology as a discipline– in spite of the fact the field is filled with cultural anthropologists…
The blogosphere certainly came into existence as a reaction to Bush and the media’s treatment of his Administration. I keep thinking when was the last time we had a successful Presidency. In my more naive days, I thought Clinton qualified despite the impeachment hoopla. But as I reassess him with time, I am less and less impressed. LBJ might have been successful with the civil rights and voting rights acts but that legacy was destroyed by Vietnam. Eisenhower wrote about the military industrial complex but did little about it. He also had Tricky Dick as his running mate and presided over a period of Cold War paranoia so he’s out. FDR’s terms had war and depression but he is the last successful President, warts and all, that we have had. And he died 65 years ago. So while it would be nice to trust our leaders and believe in their competency, history shows this almost never happens.
Distrusting your govt is a good thing. Fearing it would be even better. However, my guess is that W’s sins were not big enough to make most people do either.
the cia got it right on the 9/11 attack ecahn
off to bed, g’night all, I sleep therefore I dream…or visa versa
Hear, hear. (honey)
That is even more scarier.
Thers is up on the mothership talking about fucking.
Dude! Meet you up there.
Plus, that line will stop a thread, for sure.
Bernie’s modus operandi was “We make money the old fashioned way … we steal it.” Whatever the verb, there’s always an -or and an -ee.
That’s what we’ve been told. Doubt the story is quite so simple as the bill of goods we’ve been sold. There are butts to cover.
A testament to the power of propaganda and its ability to control an overstimulated, overindulged, and undereducated populace.
“People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.” V
Unfortunately, there is no law in America that protects us from the “criminally stupid”. At least the NFL star, Plaxico Burress will be spending two years in jail for taking a weapon into a nightclub in the Big Apple.
And as a Chicano and military vet from here in the Sonoran Desert, I am of the belief there is no credibility and certitude that comes from having a journalism degree from either a college or university, and furthermore, this formal education does not ascribe “expertise” of any kind, other than for having a well-developed skill set for stringing words together.
I am reminded that only one Journalist in America challenged Bush and Cheney, or even Congress in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, relative to the AUMF. As such, the AUMF was a bogus artifice as was LBJ’s Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. To wit, Journalists conventiently forgot that the Constitution calls for a Declaration of War, and in failing to do so, brought disrepute onto the Fourth Estate, and onto themselves.
Now, if I had my druthers, every Journalist would be serving a minimum of two years for being ‘criminally stupid’ given that all the unassailable facts were either ignored or cavalierly neglected in pursuit of a political agenda that the DFH’s and the ‘racial and ethnics’ were challenging vigorously.
In closing, a friend from Portland, Oregon, says it far better than I when he says…”There are days when karma just dances naked in the sun like the slut she it.”
Jaango
You know, I’ve heard that common, intelligent citizens are often better informed than the governments that control them, precisely because governments bet so much money on “secret spy programs!’ that don’t get them jack shit. Just wondering if anyone who knows anything about military/CIA intelligence can inform me on this.
Understanding what you’re seeing from the air also means understanding what you’re seeing when you’re standing in front of it, and in whatever papers someone might hand you about it.
I read photos like that for a living, and it’s hard to teach how to put the pieces together to understand the whole thing. And I’m dealing with large-scale plumbing, actual physical stuff, not with WMDs and government propaganda.
AA .. most intelligence is so compartmentalized that those on the gathering end rarely have the full picture .. but .. in my experience .. “intelligence” .. rendered to the people who most need it ..is seldom correct ..
and intelligence “gathered” can often be ignored by higher-ups if it doesn’t fit in with the picture they have of the situation ..
both of those scenarios have led to some fantastic screw-ups ..
ya gots to have the PI&D to pull it all together ..eh PJ ..
The premise, IIUC, is: “we, too, weren’t privy to the intelligence.” You are disputing the sufficiency of that information but Ambinder is lamenting the necessity of that unavialble information. In fact, he had access to all the information necessary to establish a very clear pattern, as Olbermann pointed out in detail earlier this week.
This is all way beyond Ambinder’s feeble attempt to try to squirm his way out of the of BS that he’s been shoveling.
You can’t get people to agree on the ten commandments,and they’re written in stone.Legal scholars will approach a legal issue and say “I read this to mean” blah blah blah.Things that are supposedly absolute,like the earth being the center of the universe and Genesis vs the big bang have a way of being sorted out over time.
The constitution was circumvented and it’s laws were twisted into interpretations that barely represent their original intent or hit with enough pixie dust to change the color of the law to pale shade of grey(or orange) to enable and protect their policy.
Since intelligence is only a “guideline” it is interpreted to draw the conclusions that are necessary for the storyline to prevail.
Everything is open to interpretation and the propagandists know it,marketing firms are masters at it,and politics are based on it.
When all the salesmen are up there selling the next war and manufacturing fear like the astroturfing con men of the drug companies it really shouldn’t be that big of a problem to read between the lines and see that war and misery are products just like any other.
You’d think that these people would recognize how visible they are and at least try to make a better show of it
there is no spoon
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzm8kTIj_0M
Source: Spiegel
Blackwater Accused of Creating ‘Killing Program’
A memo obtained by SPIEGEL indicates that cooperation between the CIA and private security firm Blackwater was deeper than previously known. SPIEGEL has uncovered further details about a plan to set up squads for targeted killings of suspected al-Qaida leadership in Afghanistan.
On Wednesday, the CIA disclosed that it had hired private security contractor Blackwater to kill senior al-Qaida members. The assassination-program has since drawn strong criticism in Washington. However, SPIEGEL has learned that the level of cooperation between the CIA and the paid mercenaries at Blackwater was even deeper than previously known.
In a memo obtained by SPIEGEL, two former employees describe details of cooperation between the firm and the intelligence agency that then-Vice President Dick Cheney asked the CIA not to disclose to the United States Congress. Even today, members of Congress do not have a complete image of the activities Blackwater undertook on behalf of the government.
The intelligence service commissioned Blackwater and its subsidiaries to transport terror suspects from Guantanamo to interrogations at secret prison camps in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Uzbekistan. The paper identifies aircraft movements and unveils how the flights were disguised. The memo says: “The CIA hired Blackwater to conduct extraordinary renditions”. And: “Blackwater flew the rendition targets from Fort Perry and Cuba to Kandahar, Afghanistan.”
……………..
Now, further details have emerged. The memo names five participants who were responsible for building the assassination team, including a member of the Blackwater’s paratrooper team and an employee of Blackwater Security Consulting, who, according to the memo was meant to be used as a “hitman.” The most important person named in the memo is the former third from the top at the CIA, ex-executive director Alvin Bernard Krongard. “Krongard set up the teams,” the paper claims. After he left the CIA, Krongard switched to Blackwater’s advisory board.
Read more: http://www.spiegel.de/internat…..405…
False choice.
You left out the third choice – and the only valid one: treat all claims of undisclosed “intelligence” with complete and utter skepticisnm and disdain! THAT is the only journalistic path! Where did you learn otherwise in journalism school??
Until those “intelligence” claims are backed up with hard evidence, they are just so much Blue Sky, as we say in the securities regulation arena. Why would you ever give government employees ANY deference? Have you HEARD of the Fourth Estate? Your one and only job is to challenge their statements at each and every turn. On the other hand, if your career goal is to be a member of the “White House Press Corps” – you seem to be well-prepared…
Go read some Upton Sinclair, would you?
Thanks. Great find. Unfortunately, a bad link:
The problem here is even more complicated.
Journalists are just not that smart. They don’t understand intelligence; neither its collection nor use to develop policy and make decisions, so can’t present an intelligible story to readers.
The result is that readers have to try to evaluate judgments made by the intelligence and policy makers based on intelligence which, by nature, boils down to probability theory, through the fuzzy prism of a story line created by a confused journalist.
A journalist who gives deference to a government agent, be he a policy maker, military, or other executive or bureaucrat, is either lazy or stupid. In either case, the journalist has never really taken the time to study and understand the subject.
The purpose of ‘intelligence’ is to provide a narrative that will seem reasonable to journalists and historians, in order to provide cover for policy that has already been established.
Policy comes before intel.
Let’s see if this one works:
Death Squad
Blackwater Accused of Creating ’Killing Program’
A memo obtained by SPIEGEL indicates that cooperation between the CIA and private security firm Blackwater was deeper than previously known. SPIEGEL has uncovered further details about a plan to set up squads for targeted killings of suspected al-Qaida leadership in Afghanistan. more…
@89
Well,type der Spiegel into your search engine.
Their is an online English version.
It has this story.
Der SpiegelEnglish language international edition of the German news source also includes in-depth special reports, weblog and summaries of what the other German …
http://www.spiegel.de/international/ – Similar
More results from spiegel.de »
These are some seriously great comments. Just catching up on them now, as I wrote this post before heading out yesterday and now the blackest cup of coffee on the planet couldn’t slow down my hangover.
eCAHN is right about the satellite stuff. Tim Weiner’s book about the history of the CIA, “Legacy of Ashes,” has a lot of great detail in it about that stuff.
Blub@10, that’s a great idea. There should be a “government pronouncements” section, penned off from real journalism. Sometimes reporters have the task of writing up speeches. Why? It’s a weird custom — sometimes I do it too — and ought to be separated from pieces that apply scrutiny to government pronouncements. Besides, I don’t see why my time is well served by transcribing stuff and why an interested reader wouldn’t prefer to see the full text of a speech or a release. The follow-on piece would be one that compared/contrasted the claims made in those speeches/releases with the accumulated body of knowledge on the topic at issue. Just some thoughts riffing off your very good comment.
Jaango@77, could I at least serve my time at a Club Fed? I throw myself at the mercy of the court of public opinion.
Also, we gotta AFP story about the Der Spiegel CIA/Blackwater memo, with some interesting stuff reported about hiring Blackwater Aviation (I presume) to ferry detainees from GTMO to black sites.
Spencer @92
As part and parcel to my self-acquired authority and under my regimen as the Prince Of The Sonoran Desert, you are hereby “pardoned” and with the caveat of “Don’t do it again!”.
And with the Gang of Six exorcising our health care reform, their single iota of ganglion will eventually surface for a VAT or Value Added Tax in order to meet their nonsensical “cost controls”. In response, our “intelligence” should be focused on a One Percent Federal Sales Tax. Now, I am off on a ‘tangent’.
Jaango
I am a former military intelligence analyst. Let me reply indirectly using an excerpt from John Le Carre’s thoroughly excellent novel “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy”"
[George Smiley:] “[They] do want money. Lots of money. I should have mentioned that. In that respect, secret services and their customers are like anyone else, I’m afraid. They value most what costs most, and Merlin costs a fortune. Ever bought a fake picture?”
“I sold a couple once,” said Toby with a flashy, nervous smile, but no one laughed.
“The more you pay for it, the less inclined you are to doubt it. Silly, but there we are.”
Damn, and in a neat little nutshell. Well that certainly explains the reaction of certain corporations to competitive intelligence reports I’ve pulled together in my time.