In article ,
"Ed Huntress" wrote:

"Joseph Gwinn" wrote in message
...
In article . com,
"rigger" wrote:

Rex B wrote:
Joseph Gwinn wrote:
On NPR I yesterday (the 16th) heard an interview of Frank Pillar, who
retired from a high post at the CIA a year or two ago, and published a
piece in the current issue of Foreign Affairs magazine.

The interviewer hewed to the mantra about the administration ignoring
and/or misusing intelligence information, repeating her phrase many
times, but Mr Pillar always answered diplomatically with a nuance-filled
reply, but didn't confront the assumptions built into her question
either.

I've listened to the interview (available online at NPR's site), and I think
the reason you got that impression is that you didn't read Pillar's article.
In fact, the interview was excellent, far superior to anything you'll hear
on commercial radio or television. And every "leading" question, as you
would have noticed if you'd read Pillar's article, was drawn directly from
what he said in that article. What Terry Gross faced was a fairly phlegmatic
Pillar, and what she did about it was what any really good interviewer would
do: go through the list of points that he made in his article, and ask him
to explain them.

I just finished reading the article, which is six pages long. In the
interview, there were many echoes of the article.

It's one thing for Pillar to make his points. He is the interviewee.
It's quite another for the interviewer to keep framing all questions
with a loaded phrase or two. It doesn't matter if the loaded phrase is
right or wrong.

It's not the interviewer's place to say such things during an interview.
If she wants to express herself, she is free to write her own opinion
piece. If she had simply asked Pillar to explain each point, I would
not have had this reaction. The issue is job description, not politics.


If this had been a court proceeding, the interviewer would have been
slapped down for biased phrasing and for attempting to lead the witness.
But Mr Pillar didn't bite, so it was more an annoyance than a problem.

Maybe you listened to a different interview. g It's also clear that you
must have listened with enormous bias going in, because I don't believe any
reasonable person (unless he didn't know what Pillar had said, and what was
noteworthy and worth expanding upon in an interview) would have concluded
that Pillar was being "led" in any direction except the one he had laid out
in his own words.

As I said in my original posting, I don't think that Terry was able to
lead Pillar anywhere he didn't want to go, so it was more an annoyance
than a problem.

Accused of "enormous bias". Hmm. This is basically an ad hominem
argument. I have an idea. Whenever you accuse me of bias,
automatically insert the standard reply "You're one too!" for me,
followed by our Mothers both calling out "Sticks and stones ...". Then
we can then get on with our lives, without undue waste of bandwidth.
This isn't a form of argument that gets us anywhere.

Alternately: My bias cancels your bias. As do our votes.


Comparing the article and the interview, it appears that Pillar is a more
cautious speaker than he is a writer. The point of interviewing a man like
that, who wrote an article like that, is to flesh out the points he made in
the article. He dragged, but he eventually came around to explaining more
about what he had written. That's the product of an expert interview. The
average radio or TV interviewer would have gotten nothing much out of that
man. He didn't come in ready to talk on his own. He came in ready to answer
questions.

So, Terry did lead the witness, or at least tried, but had no choice?


I have noticed that more and more of late. For a while NPR seemed to be
trying to be objective, but they don't appear to making that effort lately.

How much do you listen to NPR?

I've been listening for years, generally while driving. But your
question is really directed at rigger.


I think it's gone beyond "objective" being the reason for some
articles.

My problem with these interviews is more basic. I'm not sure is the
core problem is bias so much as simple lack of interviewing skills.
Maybe it's both. Some of these interviewers seem incapable of letting
an interviewee answer a question.

What are you comparing them with?

I don't see what that has to do with it. And I've had the same problem
with interviews of musicians, so the issue isn't simply that I disagree
with the interviewer. They just talk too much, and often put words into
the interviewee's mouth. As I said, I think it's at the very least a
skill issue.


Pattern: First, the long question, complete with two or three leading
answers proposed by the interviewer.

In this case, the answers were those supplied by Pillar in his article.

In this case, having read the article, I mostly agree that she wasn't
taking him anywhere he didn't want to go. But the audience cannot know
that, as most of them will never read the article.


Then a short answer. Most
interviewees don't question the the assumptions of the question,
probably from politeness, so we are really hearing what the interviewer
thinks, not what the interviewee thinks. It's very frustrating - I
wanted to know what the interviewee thinks, but he hardly gets a word in
edgewise.

He never spoke more than a few words without a question, and he never said
anything until he was reminded what he had written. That's being
phlegmatic -- an interviewer's nightmare. g

We don't actually know that he would not have given fine answers to
neutral get-him-talking questions, because no such questions were
attempted.


Look at this earlier comment:

On the matter of WMDs, Mr Pillar did say that at the time just before
the invasion, there was a worldwide consensus of intelligence agencies
that Iraq did have WMDs; the only dispute was over the likelihood that
Saddam would use them.

WHOAH! He said nothing of the kind. Here's what he actually said, in a quote
from his own article:

Sure he did, on page one for that matter:

"At the same time, an acrimonious and highly partisan debate broke out
over whether the Bush administration manipulated and misused
intelligence in making its case for war. The administration defended
itself by pointing out that it was not alone in its view that Saddam had
weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and active weapons programs, however
mistaken that view may have been.

In this regard, the Bush administration was quite right: its perception
of Saddam's weapons capacities was shared by the Clinton administration,
congressional Democrats, and most other Western governments and
intelligence services."

The above (which immediately preceded your quote) clearly says that just
about everybody thought that Saddam had WMDs. He also says the same
thing during the interview. I think we can declare the point settled.


"But in making this defense, the White House also inadvertently pointed
out the real problem: intelligence on Iraqi weapons programs did not
drive its decision to go to war. "

"A view broadly held in the United States and even more so overseas was that
deterrence of Iraq was working, that Saddam was being kept "in his box," and
that the best way to deal with the weapons problem was through an aggressive
inspections program to supplement the sanctions already in place. That the
administration arrived at so different a policy solution indicates that its
decision to topple Saddam was driven by other factors -- namely, the desire
to shake up the sclerotic power structures of the Middle East and hasten the
spread of more liberal politics and economics in the region.

"If the entire body of official intelligence analysis on Iraq had a policy
implication, it was to avoid war -- or, if war was going to be launched, to
prepare for a messy aftermath."

The "dispute" as you put it was between the Bush administration and the rest
of the world -- including the US's own intelligence community.

As I said, the US and Europe came to different conclusions as to the
likelihood that Saddam would actually use his weapons. My point was
that it is a non sequitur to conclude that because Europe and the US
came to different conclusions on this issue, that the issue cannot be
the reason that the US chose to invade.

We should recall that of the world's tyrants, only Saddam had invaded
two neighbors, used poison gas on both Iranians and the Kurds, and
continued to make menacing moves and words. So, one would tend to take
him at his word.

I don't doubt that shaking up the Middle East was another reason
(President Bush has said as much in public), but Mr Pillar has not
proven that it was the *only* reason. And the non-sequitur weakens his
argument; one assumes if he had a better argument, we would have heard
it by now.


Pillar continues his point:

"The Bush administration deviated from the professional standard not only in
using policy to drive intelligence, but also in aggressively using
intelligence to win public support for its decision to go to war. This meant
selectively adducing data -- "cherry-picking" -- rather than using the
intelligence community's own analytic judgments. In fact, key portions of
the administration's case explicitly rejected those judgments."

You should have kept on quoting:

"In fact, key portions of the administration's case explicitly rejected
those judgments. In an August 2002 speech, for example, Vice President
Dick Cheney observed that "intelligence is an uncertain business" and
noted how intelligence analysts had underestimated how close Iraq had
been to developing a nuclear weapon before the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
His conclusion -- at odds with that of the intelligence community -- was
that "many of us are convinced that Saddam will acquire nuclear weapons
fairly soon."

In other words, the Intel guys blew it in 1991, and so were disbelieved
in 2002.


Pillar's article can only be read as an indictment of the way the Bush
administration ignored the available intelligence, and as a confirmation
that the decision had been made to go to war before the intelligence was
even consulted. As Pillar said in his NPR interview, everyone in the
intelligence community knew, by May of 2002, that the administration had
already decided to go to war.

So did I, from reading the newspapers. As I said, given the logistics,
the decision would have to be 9-12 months in advance. In the first gulf
war, it took us six months to stand up the invasion force used to free
Kuwait.


The only purpose intelligence served was to
support the decision that had already been made.

One can read it that way, but one can also read it a bit differently.
When I was reading Pillar's article, it struck me as a bit of a
Pearl-Harbor memo. The intel community had a very basic problem - they
had blown their credibility in the first gulf war, and the policymakers
no longer cared what the intel people thought. That's one reason that
policymakers didn't buy what the intel folk were saying.

Another thing that struck me in the latter half of the article was that
by Pillar's description, the intel community is rather too fragile to
survive in the real world, or to be at all useful when the crunch comes.
I don't actually believe this to be true, and it's not going to happen
that the CIA will become a totally insulated agency like the Federal
Reserve.

Joe Gwinn