information purge

Knut Royce at Newsday.com reports that there is in the works a purge of the CIA. The goal is not, it would seem, an attempt to prevent future intelligence failures but instead to bring the agency into ideological line with the White House. Those officers who have leaked "damaging information to the media" or been "disloyal to President Bush" must go. This paragraph also leaps out:

"The agency is being purged on instructions from the White House," said a former senior CIA official who maintains close ties to both the agency and to the White House. "Goss [the new agency head] was given instructions ... to get rid of those soft leakers and liberal Democrats. The CIA is looked on by the White House as a hotbed of liberals and people who have been obstructing the president's agenda."

(This is getting much blogtime at present, for example see Meteor Blades. It will be interesting to see where and how this surfaces in other media, if at all. As of now, the Houston Chronicle has picked it up.)

I will grant as much as that leaking intelligence to the media in time of war is, shall we say, not always a good thing, even if the war in question is also not a good thing. Loose lips can indeed sink ships.

However, it is deeply troubling that this is framed in terms of party affiliation or loyalty or disloyalty to President Bush. The idea that this administration would purge the Central Intelligence Agency of officers based on those officers' supposed obstructiveness or non-obstructiveness with respect to the administration's agenda suggests that the real target of the purge is the very intelligence those officers bring in. The administration should be basing its agenda upon the intelligence the CIA gathers, not tailoring the CIA to only bring in that intelligence that makes the pre-determined agenda seem like the right one.

But in saying so, I identify myself as a member of the Reality-Based Community. So be it; I have hereby outed myself.

Perhaps this latest news item made you recall, as it did me, that arresting paragraph in Ron Suskind's article in the New York Times Magazine ("Without a Doubt," 17.x.04), commented on in its time on dKos:

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

I remember thinking at the time I had this before me on slick newsprint that this matter of reality-basedness went to the heart, four years later, of the massive irregularity that was the 2000 elections. In that election the difference in the totals for the two major candidates was very small indeed, and there was real question as to whether the count had been precise and accurate enough to determine who had won the plurality or, yea, majority, of the votes. But in the crisis as it developed, many Democrats took the stance that a recount should be held, and the Republicans, memorably, did everything in their authority and in their power to block a recount. They succeeded.

In light of the paragraph from Suskind's article above, we can see the same issue. A result based on a recount would have been exactly a solution emerging from the judicious study of discernible reality, the reality in question being the ballots.

Now: there remains in theory a real question about what recourse a democracy has when the difference which should determine the winner of an election is within the statistical margin of error of the system. In such a case, it really would, mathematically and statistically speaking, be impossible to answer the question of who had in fact won the election. It is the case that the Democrats did not offer a solution to this potential problem.

But the Republicans did not offer a compelling and viable alternative to reexamining reality, the actual data, the ballots themselves, in order to reach a solution. They ignored any theoretical ramifications of the problem of the margin of error and instead conducted what many regard as having amounted to a power grab. But that much is history - they did come to power - and whatever your personal take on whether the High-Court-driven resolution to the matter of the 2000 election was in any way inappropriate, you may yet still find the larger point here a necessary one. Results falling within the margin of error is a special case, and it may or may not have been the case dealt with, whether well or badly, in 2000.

Aside from that special case, there is a larger issue raised by the dismissal of reality-based thinking.

This is the crux: Democracy is a reality-based system in the sense used by the aide quoted above. Polling to determine the will of the electorate is a solution emerging from the judicious study of discernible reality. An administration that does not buy into solutions emerging from the examination of reality in the form of ballots or any other representation of the will of the electorate is an administration fundamentally opposed to democracy.

That last point bears repeating:

An administration that does not accept solutions emerging from the examination of reality does not accept the legitimacy of democracy.

At the risk of burying that point, I'll return to the initial subject: intelligence. Counting votes is one way of examining reality, a kind of reality internal to the state. Gathering and analyzing intelligence abroad is a way of examining reality external to the state. The chill that Mr. Royce's article sends though the reader signals a fear that the administration may be choosing to blind itself to information that would have allowed it to make better policy decisions. (Better than what? Better than otherwise.) It is a fear that the giant, in its rage, will put out its own eye and in so doing become more dangerous to itself and to all.

Perhaps this is all a phantom, an unruly flock of anxieties born of Mr. Royce's particular choice of words or that of his source. Certainly a word like purge sends those who've read some Soviet history to prick up their ears and listen for a different sort of Georgian accent. Perhaps it is all a misunderstanding. But some of us had hoped that the President's regrettable use of the word crusade had been an unfortunately slip of the speechwriter and that it would be, in fact, regretted. To our great dismay, that word proved to have been all too apt, all too descriptive and intentional. This fact and the way this latest news item rings the same alarm bells rung by the Suskind article make one pause and worry.