Intelligence
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OpEdNews
Op Eds 12/23/2014 at 12:04:49
Secret Torture
versus Open Source Intelligence
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In 1989, as a former spy for the CIA
who became the second-ranking civilian in Marine Corps Intelligence, I
ghost-wrote an article for the Commandant of the Marine Corps, "Global Intelligence
Challenges in the 1990's."
This was the first article to distinguish between the conventional threat and
emerging threats (such as ISIS today) and call for radical changes to how we do
intelligence. I followed this up in 1990 with my own article, "Intelligence in the
1990's: Recasting National Security in a Change World," in which I discussed six specific challenges
that have still not been addressed as of today, $1.25 trillion dollars later:
#1 Meet the Needs of ALL Public
Programs
#2 Indications & Warnings of
Revolutionary Change
#3 New Theory & Methods of
Counterintelligence
#4 Developing an Information
Technology Strategy
#5 Establish a Responsive
Requirements System
#6 Realign Resources in an Era of
Radical Change
It never occurred to me to throw
ethics in there. I took that as a given. I was wrong to take ethics for
granted. Today we are at the logical end of a quarter-century moral vacuum in
which three individuals -- James Clapper (Director of National Intelligence),
Mike Vickers (Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence), and John Brannon
(Director of the Central Intelligence Agency) represent the complete collapse
of the profession of intelligence. We lack integrity in every possible sense of
the word.
As I wrote recently in an Open Letter to President
Barack Obama (also
delivered to Dr. Susan Rice via Certified Mail),
Torture is not the only secret
program that has failed to produce intelligence with integrity -- this failure
is true of every part of the secret world from the CIA, which relies on foreign
liaison hand-outs for the bulk of its "clandestine" intelligence to
the NSA, which processes less than 1% of what it collects, to the NRO and NGA
that are inept at "Big Data" and incapable of providing all-source
fused data to the end-user at a desk in Washington or in a foxhole abroad.
This is about far more than torture
-- this is about the complicity of military and civilian intelligence in
assassinating thousands (with a documented 98% innocents along the way) while spending over a trillion
dollars in a manner that is not helpful to Whole of Government strategy,
policy, acquisition, and operations.
Torture, assassination by drone, the
out-and-out prostitution of his office by George "Slam Dunk" Tenet
that allowed Dick Cheney to get away with 935 known lies, the largest two of
which were that Al Qaeda was responsible for 9/11 and that Iraq had weapons of
mass destruction, and the general failure of a $100 billion a year intelligence
community to do anything useful these past 25 years, all boil down to a culture
of secrecy that morphed into a culture of sadistic nihilism focused on spending
money for the sake of spending money, without regard to the public interest.
I was one of the first spies assigned
the terrorist target full-time in the 1980's. I have dealt with the results of
torture. Apart from being a moral sink-hole that twists professionals, torture
produces false confessions and wasted time. It does not produce actionable
intelligence. Dick Cheney is either a liar, or has been lied to. One of my
military colleagues, the single most successful counter-intelligence officer in
modern military history, has a specific role every time we invade a new
country. He sets up the equivalent of a Marriott Courtyard for high-value
prisoners. The results, at very low cost, are as expected: immediate,
professional, and useful.
The DNI, USDI, and CIA went over the
cliff when they confused technology with thinking, secrets with intelligence,
and spending money with progress. Nothing could be further from the truth. In
the world of intelligence as decision-support, Big Data is noise. The best
intelligence -- precision intelligence -- is from a human source with direct
access, and that is not something we can do today despite millions of such
sources being available. We have no penetrations of ISIS, the clandestine
service refuses to deal with "overt" human experts, while the
diplomats and attaches have no money for commercial sourcing and modest performance
fees. In consequence we have no human assets of any import across the Middle
East, Central Asia, Africa, or the Americas at the same time that our analysts
are children lacking in real-world experience -- who in addition rarely speak
the target language and have no grasp of the culture or history of the target
population.
The alternative to the obsessions
with technology, secrecy, and money has been called for from within CIA since
1969 when Herman L. Croom first
dared to write in Studies in Intelligence of the need to get a grip on "open
sources." I took up this baton in 1988 after spending $20 million so that
my analysts in the new Marine Corps Intelligence Activity could have access to
all available secrets.
Within weeks I was stunned to find them lining up for a
single PC with access to the Internet (at the time, "The Source"). In
their words: "there is nothing in the secret data bases about Burundi,
Haiti, or Somalia." That was the beginning of the modern open source
revolution.
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