In one of the episodes of the outstanding British TV series “Yes, Minister!” the PermanentUndersecretary, Sir Humphrey, teaches his minister how to use Commissions of Inquiry:
Take an honorable retired judge, a doddering old fool, and put him in charge of the inquiry,with a sizable honorarium. Help him to arrive himself at the required conclusions. Feed himthe appropriate facts and hint at a peerage. From there on, everything will work out asdesired.
At this moment, three parallel but separate commissions of inquiry are at work: one American,one British and one Israeli. All three are supposed to find out why the intelligence communitysupplied the government with false information about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of massdestruction (WMD).
Of course, the commissions are not really intended to discover the truth. Their purpose iswhitewash. In order to understand what has happened, no honorable judge, Lord, formersenator or retired Mossad operative is required. Simple common sense will do.
Clearly, he who appoints a commission of Inquiry decides in advance what the conclusions willbe. When a member of the Establishment is appointed to investigate the Establishment , theconclusion will be that the Establishment has committed no wrong.
In Israel, for example, we had the Agranat commission. Shimon Agranat, a respected SupremeCourt judge, was appointed chairman of a commission and asked to apportion blame for thefateful failures of the 1973 Yom Kippur war. The inquiry was limited in advance to the firstdays of the war, so the events leading up to the war (including government decisions) wereexcluded. The result: The Prime Minister (Golda Meir) and the Minister of Defense (MosheDayan) came our white as snow. All the blame landed on some military officers.(The conclusions were so scandalous that the general public rose up against them. Thecommission’s report was thrown into the waste basket, Golda and Dayan were forced to resign.)
In the UK, Sir Humphrey’s method still works. Lately, an honorable etc. etc. judge was chargedwith the investigation of whether the Prime Minister has “sexed-up” an intelligence reportin order to drag the country into war. The honorable judge concluded, of course, that the PrimeMinister was completely blameless, and that the hostile media (in this case the BBC) were toblame for everything.
In Britain, unlike Israel, when a Supreme Judge makes his decision, everybody stands up andsings “God Save the Queen”. A few young people donned judges’ wigs and threw white paint atDowning Street buildings, in order to suggest that the Lord judge’s report was a whitewash.But the Prime Minister was not forced to resign, instead, the chairman of the BBC did.
Now three commissions are at work. The Israeli one, which was appointed in secret and works insecret, will finish first. After that, it will be the turn of the British one (which is requiredto investigate only the intelligence community, after the honorable Lord judge hasinvestigated the political structure). In the end, well after the election in the US, theAmerican commission will publish its report. All three resemble each other: they wereappointed by the political leaders, they are forbidden to investigate the politicalleadership and tasked with inquiring only into the quality of the information supplied by theintelligence agencies to the political leaders.
President George W. Bush dragged the United States into war on the basis of the contention thatSaddam Hussein had WMD that endangered America. Saddam, he said, would turn over such weaponsto al-Qaida terrorists, who would use them to cause mass slaughter in American cities.
Prime Minister Tony Blair told his people that Saddam could use WMD against British citieswithin 45 minutes (Not 40, not 50, but exactly 45).
In Israel, the Sharon government distributed gas masks to the population and created panic,saying that Saddam would shower us with missiles carrying chemical warheads.
Well, the Americans and British occupied Iraq and no WMD were found. No chemical, nobiological, no nuclear. None at all.
So, how come all these illustrious intelligence agencies were wrong? What made them feedtheir political leaders with false information and cause Bush, Blair & Co. to start a war inwhich a country was devastated and many human beings killed?
Common sense would say: Bush & Blair were “deceived”, because they wanted to be deceived. Bushand the Neo-cons who have taken over Washington had decided from the beginning to attack Iraq,mainly in order to control the oil, and the tales of WMD were designed to provide a pretext thatwould frighten the masses.
Did the political leaders explicitly demand that their intelligence organizations supplythem with mendacious reports? Perish the thought! The commissions of inquiry will affirmthat no such thing happened. And correctly so. The leaders did not ask for this, because therewas no need to ask. The American, British and Israeli intelligence chiefs knew perfectly wellwhat was required of them and delivered the goods. They knew which side their bread wasbuttered on.
Did the intelligence people deliberately falsify their information to achieve this? Therewas no need. The intelligence community collects enormous quantities of information. Fromthis huge pile they are supposed to extract the items that they consider credible.Surprisingly enough, the credible material is always that which the political leadersdesire.
The decisive function of every intelligence agency is not the collecting of the information,but its evaluation. How do the mosaic stones form a picture? That is a matter of judgement andintuition, both subject to a general “concept”. This is a mental pattern in the mind of theintelligence chief. And since the intelligence chiefs are appointed by the politicalleaders, no wonder that their concepts almost always suit the concepts of the leaders.
I predict that all three commissions of inquiry, each in its own country, will come to theconclusion (a) that the political leaders did not ask the intelligence people to falsifytheir reports and did not exert any pressure on them, (b) that the intelligence people actedhonestly and supplied intelligence evaluations according to their best knowledge andabilities, (c) that everybody acted according to the best information available at the time,and (d) that there was a lamentable professional failure.
Neither of the three commissions will state the obvious: that the intelligence agencies areunder the jurisdiction of the President (in the US) or the Prime Minister (in the UK andIsrael), and that these bear the responsibility for their deeds and misdeeds. They appointthe intelligence chiefs and are supposed to supervise them. Therefore, in view of thiscolossal intelligence failure, all three of them should resign. That will not be said and willnot happen.
If all the blame is laid at the door of the intelligence people, they should be looked at. Allover the world, they are admired. The mystique that envelops them creates an almost religiouscult that feeds a large flock of journalists and writers. The intelligence operativepictured in their stories is a superman like Smiley, John Le Carre’s hero, a brilliant manendowed with almost superhuman intelligence, a cold-blooded, sophisticated genius whoweaves his nets with incredible patience.
Unfortunately, such a person does not exist. As one says in English: “army intelligence” is anoxymoron.
How do I know? There are some simple tests, which every logical person can apply for himself.
First test: human quality. All intelligence people are eventually pensioned off, and thenthey can be viewed from close up, without censorship and the cover of mystery. And what does onesee? Among them there are some highly intelligent people. There are also quite a number ofcomplete fools. But most of them are very average, superficial people, with very ordinary,conformist views. We would not rely on such people to give us advice on our investments. It isquite shocking to realize that these people have decided the of nations.
In Israel this is especially obvious, because retired intelligence people star as politicalcommentators in all our media. It appears that their average IQ is not higher than that ofKnesset members. And, since one cannot assume that before that they were geniuses, and only onretirement some mysterious neurological process eliminated their mental superiority,there is no escape from the conclusion that even before, their IQ was average-minus.
In an apparatus in which such people dominate, an intelligent person has to assimilatehimself. He adapts in order to survive.
Second test: results. By now it is banal to mention the classical intelligence failures ofWorld War II. The Russians were surprised by the German attack on their country, the Americansby the Japanese bombardment of Pearl Harbor. American intelligence was surprised by thecollapse of the Soviet Union. American and Israeli intelligence were totally surprised bythe Khomeini revolution in Iran. Israeli intelligence was surprised by the Egyptian armyconcentrations in Sinai on the eve of the 1967 “Six-day” war, by the Egyptian-Syrian attack onYom Kippur in 1973, by the advent of Hizbullah in South Lebanon, by the first and secondIntifadas and the Rabin assassination. American intelligence did not even dream about theSeptember 11 attack. The list is long.
The American, British and Israeli intelligence agencies did not have the slightest ideaabout what was happening in Iraq, and whether Saddam had WMD or not. They guessed. And if oneguesses, it is best to guess what the government wants to hear.
“Does Saddam have weapons of mass destruction?”
“Yes, Prime Minister!”