Miniter On The CIA

Yesterday, Richard Miniter was on with Jed Babbin. Now for those out there that don't know who Richard Miniter is can head over to Wikipedia, and read his bio. But all you really need to know about him is he is considered an expert in the realm of terrorism. His three bestsellers: Losing Bin Laden, Shadow War, and Disinformation are must reads for anyone who wants to understand the war we're engaged in. And, I always enjoy it when he shows up on a talk show. He is, by far, one of the best "lay scholars" there is on the subject of terrorism. Below is the transcript, care of Generalissimo Duane, from yesterday's interview:

JB: Talking to you about the politics of intelligence, and why the politics is so awry, and why people are apparently trying to get us to lose this war by not being able to gather the right intelligence. Joining me right now to talk about this horrendous mess is one of my favorite people. Author Rich Miniter, author of Disinformation. If you don't get it, you don't get it. Rich, thanks for joining us.

RM: Jed, thanks for having me on.

JB: Hey look, let's talk first off about the point of Disinformation, because we're talking tonight about two things. Number one, the dysfunctional CIA, and number two, the fact that we are not fighting adequately the ideological war. How do you see that the enemy is fighting an ideological war against us?

RM: Well, you've got to remember, Jed, that al Qaeda has its own television production unit called Al Sahab, that's Arabic for the clouds. They produced the videos that you see from Zawahiri, and occasionally, rarely from bin Laden. There's a separate unit for producing audio tapes. There's yet another unit designed to influence the Arabic language and other newspaper and magazine columns. So they're very sophisticated. They see this as an information war. There was a letter captured from the number two guy in al Qaeda, Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, to Zarqawi, the head of al Qaeda in Iraq, where he said this is largely an information war. And the Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, has agreed with him, that we are winning on the battlefield, but we're losing on the information front. It's partly because the media's not really on our side. They tend to emphasize America's battle losses rather than the losses of the enemy, and it's really bizarre, Jed. I mean, if you were to score a gain where you're only looking at what the home team scores, and not at what the visiting team scores, you don't really have a full picture of the game. We don't really have a full picture of the war.

This is the first thing, right off the bat, that Richard highlights, and he's right. We are losing the "propoganda" war. The media--which the Left continues to deny the bias--dislikes this president, this administration, and this war. They cite and highlight the bad news, for the most part. (Abu Ghraib, anyone? A primary example is how long this story has stayed in the news, and the fact that the media uses almost any sort of story to remind us of Abu Ghraib; reviews for V For Vendetta had Abu Ghraib allusions, aplenty.) But we are missing this point. War is not just simply destroying the enemy on the battlefield. If we remember back to World War II (and I use the world war allusion for a reason; this is a world war) the propoganda war was solid. It was firmly on the side of the Allies. In this war, we lack that. I'm not stating that the media has to be a willing lap-dog, but the bad news far outweighs the good news. I would say that for every good story coming out of the war, the media puts out 50-100 bad stories. Al Qaeda sees this. As a matter of fact, they admit it. In the post I put up last night regarding the capture of Abu Aisha, I pointed out this from the al Qaeda documents released by the CENTCOM:

"Other word, the significance of the strategy of their work is to show in the media that the American and the government do not control the situation and there is resistance against them."

Al Qaeda recognizes, as our enemy in Vietnam did, that if you can present enough bad news for the public, that the public's attitude will change. Add the antiwar crowd into the mix, and you have the makings of breaking the morale of the country. They know it, and they are using it to the best of their abilities.

JB: Well, that's true, Rich. But isn't it really the fault of our leadership? I mean, they could be out there. I mean, they could be saying that radical Islam is an ideology, not a religion. They could be saying that the American system is better than anything these people would ever prepare or offer, just like we beat the ideology of communism, not just by outspending them, but by telling people hey, just compare. Look at what we do versus what they do. Why aren't our leaders doing more of that?

RM: Well, that's a great question. And if you looked during the Cold War, we had West Berlin shining as a wonderful example against East Berlin. When the U.S. forces finally went into Fallujah in Iraq, they found a mini-dictatorship run by insurgents, in which they were executing both women and children if the women weren't wearing veils, where they dragged hundreds of women and children into the central Mosque, and executed them with American M-16's, because they wanted to blame the attack on the Mosque on U.S. forces. As it happened, we sent in Iraqi forces who were not equipped with M-16's, and we were able to show that this was simply a propaganda point on their behalf. But now Fallujah is a great success story. There's thriving businesses, employement is up, housing prices have gone up more than 30% in the past year. Pick a bad neighborhood in the United States where that's happened. And you know, we're not showcasing this. We're not turning Fallujah into the West Berlin of Iraq. I think that's a huge mistake.

See, or enemy may seem like they're unsophisticated and "backwoods-ish" by our own selfish standards, but they're not. Anyone remember the al Qaeda training manual? The first two things under the Eighteenth Lesson where prisons and detainment is discussed is as follows:

1. At the beginning of the trial, once more brothers must insist on proving that torture was inflicted on them by State Security [investigators] before the judge.

2. Complain [to the court] of mistreatment while in prison.

It's a sure thing that many of those detained at Gitmo have done this. As a matter of fact, we have plenty of stories that revolve around supposed abuses and Koran desecretion, and very little has been found in the way of truth regarding these matters. (Newsweek had to retract the Koran story once it's "sources" started backpeddling.) But this part that Richard is referring to--the set-up by the terrorists of our troops involved in a "war crime" shows the steps they're willing to go through. And that should be noted by the people who are constatly slandering our efforts.

JB: All right. Well, let's go to the flip side of the question. We have now the departure of Porter Goss at the CIA. You have more insight into intelligence matters than any other three people I know. What is going on there? Is there any hope for the revival of the CIA? For transforming it for real? And making it do the job we need it to do?

RM: Well, I think it's a tremendous mistake to let Goss leave. Negroponte succeeded in forcing him out, his Yale classmate from the Class of 1960. Negroponte has a very establishment view, and he wanted to get rid of Goss, because Goss was eliminating a lot of the middle and upper management of the CIA who were still stuck in a pre-9/11 mindset. These are the people who hate Bush for fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, that think we need to work out some solution, maybe pull back from Israel and try to appease the terrorists. These are the people like Mary McCarthy, who was recently fired for leaking against the administration. Goss got rid of her. Now Hayden is coming in. He's going to be the best friend of the bureaucracy. He's not going to force the agencies to work together and share information, which it very much needs to happen. He's also not going to force them to develop more human intelligence. Remember, satellites can just show you the picture of the tops of people's heads.

Now, I'll be honest here. I have heard both sides of the Hayden arguments. I've heard the pro-stuff, that he's one of the best guys who could come in and really shake the tree in the CIA. And I've also heard this sort of a "review" of Mike Hayden. That because he's been too long under Negroponte that he's started to develop a similar mindset. This is a point of contention that will have to be answered in his confirmation hearings. But if he's going to protect the bureaucracy, then he isn't the guy for the job. We need to move forward from a post-11 Spetember thought process. That means more rapid response from SIGINT (Signals Intelligence), OSINT (Open Source Intelligence), and COMINT (Communications Intelligence). We also need to focus more on HUMINT (Human Intelligence). We need to be quicker than our enemy in acting and reacting to intelligence we receive, and the way the CIA is operating right now, we aren't doing that. In addition, I have read a few blogs where those people (ones who have past experience in intelligence) have said that Negroponte wasn't happy with the direction that Goss moved in terms of fixing the CIA. With Hayden coming in, he could seriously affect the changes made by Porter Goss.

JB: Right.

RM: But what you need to know is what's going on inside those heads? What plots are they developing against us? I'm not optimistic at all that Hayden will be able to do that. The good news is I don't think that Hayden has...Hayden has only maybe a 15% chance of being confirmed by the Senate. There's a lot of people who are concerned with putting a general in charge of the CIA, and that argument is largely a cover. Yes, there are people who say last time we had a military officer, it was Stansfield Turner, who as you and I both knew under Carter, was a total disaster.

Under Turner, he and Carter worked to really hurt the CIA. As for the argument made that people don't like a general in charge, it becomes moot if he resigns from the Air Force. One of the things that could hurt his confirmation is his involvement in the NSA surveillance program; this is a point of contention within the Congress that has two sides to the issue. Sen. Arlen Specter has threatened to withhold NSA budget funds if there isn't more transparency in the program. There are others, like Rep. Pete Hoekstra, that understands that the NSA program is a benefit to our war efforts, and not the detriment that others bring up.

JB: Yeah, it was a disaster.

RM: But in reality, they want a reformer at CIA, and Hayden is not that. He's a yes man.

JB: Well, it seems to me that they could be saying it a whole lot better. I mean, they're saying we don't want him at the CIA because he'd be loyal to the Pentagon. I mean, it sounds to me like...I'm old enough to remember the JFK campaign in 1960, and people whispering oh, he's a Catholic. He's going to take orders from the Pope. You know, Don Rumsfeld is not the Pope, and JFK didn't take orders from him anyway. And the whole point of saying that he's qualified, Hayden is, because he's a general, it seems ludicrous. Why can't people come out and say what's obvious? The CIA is A) dysfunctional, and B) in a way, it's gone rogue. It's trying to affect American policy, contrary to the decisions of the President.

RM: Well, I was talking to our mutual friend, Richard Perle, and he said you know, we train people to lie at the CIA. Why are we surprised when they spend their time lying and trying to do regime change in Washington? It's what we trained them to do, they're just pointed in the wrong direction.

But, it's not the CIA directly doing it. It's the bureaucrats within CIA that are doing this. They don't like the direction the administration took in the GWOT. They're not happy about some of the intelligence steps that have been taken--like the NSA program--and are doing what they can to affect change in their own views. But that change isn't to help America. It's to hurt and embarress the administration, and it's ability to wage war against our enemies.

JB: Well, how do we repoint them? I mean, if Hayden's not the guy to do it, I mean, if you were sitting next to the President, what would you tell him to do with respect to the CIA?

RM: Well, I think you've first of all got the upper bureaucracy. The second thing is you say look, it's not good enough to simply take intelligence tips from our foreign intelligence services. We need to develop human sources and intelligence. We also need to get rid of this concept that they have in the intelligence community. We have 16 different intelligence agencies, and we need to make them work together. We need to get away from this concept of a consensus view. We need to say wait a minute, let's hear opposing points of view, and let's let the policy makers, the people we elect to make the hard decisions, make those decisions.

This is something I disagree with. If by those elected Richard's referring to the president, that's fine. I agree. But if he's referring to the monkeys in Congress, hell no. These people make a living out of compromising, and our security can't be compromised. You can't barter over it. There's no horse-trading involved. Either we do something that makes us safer, or we don't. I do agree that, in the overall scheme, the DNI is supposed to streamline the whole intelligence process. But it's plainly clear that Nagroponte doesn't want to play the game that way. He seems dead-set on doing only what he wants, and the country be damned. That was more than evident by the fact he dragged his heels in revealing the Iraqi documents collected since the beginning of the 2003 invasion. Negroponte, for whatever reason, didn't want them released. Since doing so, bloggers have hit the documents like an 9.0 earthquake, and uncovered plenty of information that, for some unknown reason, our intelligence agencies didn't feel they were worth noting. Meanwhile, we've learned that the Hussein regime had full knowledge of al Qaeda in their country, that the Hussein regime was considering opening up a new diplomatic dialogue with Iran, and that the Hussein regime was still in possession of chemical WMDs in 2000. Yet the analysts in our intelligence agencies felt that none of this was worth noting. No offense, but when you're getting your @$$ handed to you in the propoganda war, with a willing and able media seemingly on the side of our enemy, information to the public is a necessity.

JB: So you'd basically split up the intel guys and say maybe we'll have competing teams? Let's have a blue team and a gold team, and you're both going to get to brief the President, and maybe one of you can convince him that you're right and the other guys is wrong?

RM: I talked to Paul Wolfowitz back when he was Deputy Defense Secretary. He said why don't you give us opposing points of view? Is it really possible that all of you agree on this? Or is it possible you just watered down everyone's point of view to form a consensus? And the truth is not something that's found by committee. We know that there's certain operators, certain people who are very good at figuring out what's going on, and other people who are really not up to it. And if you average someone who's a pro basketball player with someone who's a high school basketball player, you don't get professional material. This whole consensus approach is a mistake.

Agreed. Consensus comes from those making the decision. The goal of the intelligence agencies is to present the most up-to-date information to the people who make the decisions. If you have intelligence agencies reaching a consensus, then they're effectively cutting the president, the Sec/Defense, and the president National Secuirty Advisor out of the loop. They're not getting all the information. They're getting the information that the intelligence consensus reaches. That's not passing on ALL the relevant information.

JB: Thirty seconds left, Rich. What do we do with the CIA? Do we just have to close it and start all over again?

RM: No, but I think we have to really think about the elements that work and don't work. There's a lot of talk now about splitting it up into pieces. That's not a bad idea. I think ultimately the most radical solution, the one that no one will really consider, is turning it all over to the Department of Defense. Their job is to defend the country. They are the best consumers of this information. They're going to want the best possible information.

Personally, I disagree with the radical idea. the Pentagon's not the answer. It may be a solid move to give them a piece of the CIA, but to turn the whole shebang over to them isn't the answer. Splitting it up may be a solid idea except that in doing so you effectively create an even larger bureaucracy in the long run. A top-to-bottom reform is actually needed, and a gutting of the bureaucrats--the proverbial "night of long knives"--needs to occur. I know a lot of people dislike that idea, but it's no different than the idea I have for ICE. A top-down reform is needed for many of these government organizations that still maintain a pre-11 September mindset.

JB: They may very well want to have the responsibility, but heck, they don't want that job. Rich Miniter, author of Disinformation, you've got to read that book.

I like Richard Miniter, and I like the information he provides. We may differ on steps to be taken, but that is what debate is all about. We do have problems in the CIA, and in the intelligence community. To that there is no argument. Can Mike Hayden actually effect the change that's needed? I guess we'll see if he passes the confirmation process. I can't say I'm completely sold on the idea, but I'm leaning more towards being in favor of him. If there's anything that is of serious concern regarding General Hayden, I'm hoping it will come out in the hearings. But changes must be made at CIA.

We are at war. We need our intelligence agencies working 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to ensure that this nation is never attacked again the way it was on 11 September. However, the bureaucrats have a different idea regarding this war, and it's the wrong mindset. Their sort of thought process is going to get more people killed. We can't afford that. And based on the information that Richard Miniter revealed int his interview regarding how our enemy is fighting a full-on propoganda war, and we're yawning about it on the sidelines, raises my ire. If we're not careful on that front, we could be facing a withdrawal similar to that of Vietnam.

It falls to the administration to sit at the podium each day, and fight the propoganda coming from our enemy. Every time an MSM outlet puts out a story that slams the administration, they have to be there to correct the record, and shut down the argument. Their "absentee landlord" syndrome needs to end. War is multifaceted. It's not just boots on the ground, missiles in the air, and dead guys on a battlefield. It includes information, and that is a part of this war that we're losing everytime the administration misses the opportunity to fire back at critics and questioners. And it misses the opportunity when it refuses to snap the intelligence agencies back in line with the current thinking that we are in a war that we can't lose.

Publius II