Why Didn't Anyone Tell Us?

Dianne Feinstein is funny when peeved:

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, harshly criticized the CIA and the rest of the intelligence community for failing to forecast the uprising in the Middle East and warned the White House not to intervene in Libya without international support.

"Our intelligence, and I see it all ... was woefully inadequate. [The unrest in] Tunisia was the only intelligence we got right," Feinstein told TPM Tuesday, adding that U.S. intelligence completely missed the instability in Egypt, Yemen and Bahrain.

Feinstein chalked up the black hole on intelligence in the Middle East to the failure to have the right "human assets" gathering information on the ground, as well as a fundamental failure to analyze and evaluate open-source intelligence on social medium platforms. She also derided a briefing on the Middle East she received from intelligence officials last week, saying it contained "nothing that we didn't see in the newspapers."

Actually, the process of getting good intelligence is painfully simple, and was the original reason for having an intelligence service in the first place, but doubtlessly is rarely-used today.

You get an intelligent person to read the local news, in the native language, and that person prepares a summary that the policymaker then reads. Simple! But everyone knows that what policymakers read gets acted upon, so you can't just leave it be at that. There are now so many levels that the intelligence has to pass through to get to the policymaker, with everyone adding or subtracting their own self-interested angle, that honest intelligence has no way to make it to the policymaker. So, you get ignorant and unprepared policymakers. And that's how everyone likes it!

Remember the WMD controversies of 2003? The lesson from all that is that the manipulators (like Dick Cheney) control the product, not the authors of the intelligence briefings, who might have better understanding. That's what you get in bad governments, like we have in these days of decadent American Empire - since 1960, to be sure. And our newspapers are controlled too: look at the neocon grip on the Washington Post! It's a veritable Hall of Mirrors on the Potomac these days! The interests control everything!

For years, people have been saying that the Middle East is fundamentally unstable. It is hardly a surprise that Middle East has revealed itself to be - fundamentally unstable. All you have to have done is read a newspaper in the last thirty years to know that.

Simplify the model. Or read a newspaper once in a while, preferably produced by disinterested people from somewhere else, like Europe or the Middle East, and get some fresh air in your cocoon. Don't blame your cocoon-minders for your ignorance!