In article ,
"Ed Huntress" wrote:

"Joseph Gwinn" wrote in message
...
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 [March-April 2006] 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.

I don't agree. It's Pillar's job to clarify both the perspective and the
details. It's the interviewer's job to get him to support what he said, or
not, if he can't support it, in the article that provoked the interview in
the first place.

This is not Pillar's show. This is NPR's show, and it's their responsibility
to get something out of Pillar that's illuminating, beyond what his article
said. If he doesn't have the goods, then it's NPR's job to make that clear.
If he does, then the purpose of the interview is to prove it. You have to
force him into corners where he has to put up or shut up. That's what Terry
did.

Well, I agree that an interviewer should ask some sharp questions, but I
don't agree that this requires loaded questions. In either direction.


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.

It would be tedious to examine every point, but I don't think she was
"expressing herself." What she was doing was pushing Pillar to explain
himself. That she did.

I don't agree, but we are going in circles here.


His article was an indictment. Everyone who has read it and commented upon
it, that I have seen, agrees on that point. That's why it is news. If Pillar
is going to back off from that position, it should be exposed. He has to be
pushed to see where the limits of his claims actually lie. That, Terry did
as well. Her job is not to defend the administration. Her job, as is that of
all journalists, is to challenge authority, not to defend it.

Did it again. First, we hear that the questions were not biased, then
we hear that it was biased in service of a higher calling. Can't have
it both ways.


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.

Well, you may dislike the style. I would like to see where an interview
conducted according to your preferences would have led. My guess is that it
would have spiraled down into vacuous equivocation.

Equivocation is not the purpose of radio interviews. Sharp, incisive
revelation of the subject at hand is the purpose. You don't get a result
like that by letting a phlegmatic interviewee like Pillar wind himself down
like a clock. You have to keep winding him up.

The thing that strikes me about this is that you don't seem to see the
problem with loaded words, alternately denying that the words are loaded
and saying that they are necessary to get the interviewee to talk.

I would submit that it's difficult to make a persuasive counterargument
to a position that one does not understand well enough to summarize
fairly, summarize well enough that an opponent would agree was correct.
Given that understanding, phrasing sharp questions that are not at the
same time loaded one way or another becomes possible.


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.

That's an argument akin to saying that the proper balance is between two
sides of any issue, whether one of them is accurate or not. It doesn't fly.

No, not at all. It matters not one wit if the accusation is true or
false. I'm saying only that ad hominem arguments are not particularly
persuasive, but are pretty time-consuming. And tend to degenerate into
pointless flamewars.


If you feel my perspective is biased, you're free to explain your point of
view. Mine is that you can't claim that Pillar was "led" in a biased
interview without believing that his equivocations to be the important
subject. They are NOT the subject. His quite direct, accusatory assertions
ARE the subject. His equivocations are rhetorical noise. And to expect his
equivocations to get equal time, in an interview in which he's expected to
explain the rather direct accusations that he's made, is to prefer the
caveats to the thrust of his argument.

The accusation of enormous bias was against me, not Mr Pillar, so I fail
to see the relevance.

Nor did I accuse Mr Pillar of bias. Error perhaps, but not bias.


His article, Joseph, was a fairly strong indictment. Again, that is the
news, that is the subject. That he couched it with the rhetorical devices
common to policy-journal articles is not the news. The question, and the
news, revolves around whether his essential accusations are accurate and
whether he can defend them in an interview. If he backed off from Gross's
questions that provoked a clarification or documentation with examples, then
the news would be that he's not willing to defend what he wrote. He has to
be pushed into that corner. He's made serious accusations. The job of the
interviewer is not to give him cover. It's to see if he's really up to what
he's claimed, to see what the substance of his argument is.

I certainly agree here. My complaint against Terry Gross is one of
technique, not objective. Sharp questions need not be loaded.


And it's to give him an opportunity to clarify anything he said that may be
misleading or incomplete. That chance he was given. In a few cases, he
employed the bureaucrat's tendency to cover his ass. But for the most part,
he re-asserted them, in some cases more strongly, under provocation from the
interviewer. That's what such an interview is all about, or is supposed to
be. We see it done right all too seldom.

Right. He did stand behind his article, on all points.


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

Again, if you want to make a case for my bias, feel free to do so. My bias
is mostly toward the things I've been trained to do as a writer and an
editor: to put the son of a bitch on the ropes and make him explain himself.

Finding the man without bias is right up there with going around with a
lantern seeking an honest man. We are all too human, and we all have
our biases and blind spots. Even writers and editors are human.


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.

If you have a good idea about what superior interviewing skills might be, it
would be interesting to hear them. I have been interviewing people for close
to 30 years, for print publication and for quotes for presentations. It's
not an easy skill. Hardly anyone I've ever known is better at it than the
old-timers at NPR.

It's been a while. Christopher Lyeden (sp?) of The Connection (before
he got into the tangle with the then manager of the local Boston NPR
station (FM 90.1)) is pretty good. He was on the street for a few
years, and is now back with a radio show called "Open Source" on a
different station (FM 89.7?). Unfortunately, it isn't on when I'm
driving most of the time, so I usually miss it.


Rather than mince around, let me explain what I see going on here. Most
people want journalists to cater to their points of view. THAT'S NOT THEIR
JOB. Their job, as Thomas Jefferson alluded to over 200 years ago, is to
question power, to question authority. Since power in the US tends to equate
with money and business, that means that the job is to put money's feet to
the fire. To the degree that politicians are in bed with money, it means
putting their feet to the fire, too. That means questioning and challenging
the established power and authority, which stems from economic power and
political manipulations. Economic power in the US tends to be in the hands
of the conservative establishment. Thus, journalists' primary job, in a
republic such as ours, is to question and challenge the establishment. It's
done far too seldom.

Be careful. Journalism is not a Mission from God, and journalists are
neither omniscient nor inerrant.


Pillar wrote an article that challenges the establishment point of view. If
there's anything to it, it's journalists' job to clarify it, to highlight
the argument, if it has substance. That's part of the process of challenging
the establishment. If he has something to contribute, they should be shining
a light on it.

If there is no challenge to established power, it's not journalism's job to
do PR for the establishment. They do that quite well on their own. That's
not journalism's business.

Agree on the general objective, but not necessarily on the means.


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 the audience doesn't know what the interview is about. It is NOT about
an explication of Pillar's article. It's about whether the thrust of the
article can stand scrutiny. The article is public record. It's the whole
reason for the interview.

Huh? Of course they don't know what it's about - they never read the
article. And when I went to the bookstore to get "the current issue", I
came up empty-handed, as the current issue was too new to be on the
shelves. I was saved when Sphero posted the URL.


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.

He can write another article if he wants the nuances of his thoughts to be
handled as *he* wants them handled. And that, too, should be scrutinized, if
it amounts to an accusation, as his first one was.

True enough, but how is this an answer to my point?


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.

That isn't the point that I was challenging. Of course, anyone who follows
this issue knows that most people, including the intelligence establishment,
thought Saddam had WMDs.

Could you help me here? I don't know how else to interpret "WHOAH! He
said nothing of the kind".


The point I take issue with is your conclusion:
that there was an actual dispute over whether Saddam would use them. There
was no such dispute. There was the opinion of the experts around the world,
including the US intelligence community, and there was the Bush
administration, ignoring that opinion.

No, I didn't say that the Intel community thought that Saddam would use
his WMDs. I said that the dispute was between governments, specifically
those of the US and those of France and Germany.

Mr Pillar is saying that the US administration should have listened to
the intel community. Later he admits that the intel community blew it
in 1991, and so were having some trouble with credibility in 2002, three
years later.

Politicians judge each other's intentions all the time, and intel is
only one input. This time, the US administration judged that the intel
folk were wrong, judged that based on past behaviour, Saddam was likely
to use whatever weapons came to hand.


You've taken a rhetorical device used in Pillar's very formally constructed
article and you let it lie there, as if that was his conclusion. It was NOT
his conclusion. His conclusion was the points I quoted: that the Bush
administration ignored the analysis, ignored the general consensus that
containment was working, and went off on its own tangent.

Rhetorical style usually requires granting the minor points of your
opposition before bringing down the hammer. You ignored the hammer, and
implied that the rhetorical fillip was the conclusion. Not so.

Huh?


As I said, the US and Europe came to different conclusions as to the
likelihood that Saddam would actually use his weapons.

No, it wasn't the "US and Europe" that came to different conclusions. It was
the world, plus the US intelligence establishment, versus a few neocons in
the US administration. Pillar makes that point clearly. So does practically
everyone else who isn't in the orbit of the current US administration.

Well, we could go down the list. Not all of Europe agreed with the
French and Germans. But it's beside my point that the disagreement does
not prove that the issue disagreed about cannot have been the reason.
Quite the contrary, and the disagreements were quite loud and public at
the time. The French and Germans wanted to keep on trying with
diplomats and sanctions, while the US had concluded that this was
pointless, and that it was time for fire and sword.


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.

Nobody said that it was. Pillar did not say that it was. Pillar said that
the knowledgable intelligence community, throughout the western world, knew
that there was no substance to the US administration's claims that
"intelligence" was indicating that Saddam was a threat that couldn't be
contained. Nearly everyone else in the world looked at the evidence and saw
that he WAS being contained. That included the US intelligence community.
That was Pillar's point.

I'm sorry, but Pillar did say exactly that, and also wrote that, so I
doubt that I misheard.


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.

Nobody was taking Saddam at his word. The intelligence community was looking
at his capabilities, his non-relationship with Al Qaida, and concluded that
he did not have the capabilities or the relationships to do what Bush was
claiming was an imminent threat.

The US administration didn't believe the Intel community on this, based
on the stellar performance of intel in 1991, where they totally missed
how close Iraq's atomic weapon program was to a bomb. It turned out to
have been a very close call. If Saddam had held off for another year
before invading Kuwait, things could have gone very differently.
Presidents tend to remember such things. For a very long time.


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.

Bush sold the American public on the idea that Saddam was an imminent
threat, that he was months away from having a nuclear bomb, and that he had
relationships with Al Qaida that would lead to the use of Iraqi chemical and
biological weapons by terrorists, on our soil. Pillar said that no
legitimate intelligence indicated that, and that no analysts were concluding
such a thing. That's all he said. And his argument is a strong one.

And the US administration simply didn't believe the intel folk on this,
as discussed above.


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.

But you missed the point that Cheney had NO REASON at all to believe what he
said. None. Nada. No intelligence, no evidence. Pillar made the precise
point: Bush and the administration had nothing except the desire to destroy
Saddam for any reason he could imagine.

As I said, the administration didn't trust the intel community to get it
right. And not without reason.


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.

But that isn't what Bush said. If your conclusion was right, Bush was either
an idiot or a liar. Right?

Not so fast. One can stop on a dime. What one cannot do on a dime is
to whistle up an army in place and ready to go. The papers were full of
getting-ready stories at the time.


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.

The point is, the policymakers had no reason to believe anything else,
except their own imaginations.

They intentionally ignored and hid the concerns coming from the intelligence
community. Pillar was in charge of some of them. He knew how the
administration was mishandling the analysis.

Remember, the then consensus of the intel community was that Saddam had
or would soon have WMDs, and that Saddam had invaded two neighbors (Iran
and Kuwait) and had already used mustard and nerve gasses on the
Iranians and the Kurds. Should one then conclude that Saddam would have
held back if he happened to have a nuclear weapon, despite all his talk
of destroying Israel and purifying Saudi Arabia?


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.

He said the intel community can be undermined by politics and the
policymakers, as they were in this case. That appears to be the nature of
independent sources of information and analysis throughout governments
everywhere. Our own Federal Reserve would be useless if it was as subject to
the political policy establishment as our intelligence community is. It
needs something to shield it from policy directives, or we wind up with
policy driving the attention of intelligence and the very kind of screw-up
we just experienced.

How did US political interference cause the intel agencies of the rest
of the world (including France and Germany) come to the consensus that
Saddam had or would soon have WMDs?


I think his central point stands up to both reason and experience.

It should be apparent that I wouldn't go quite that far.


Joe Gwinn