18 July 2007
Out of the Blue
Three-card Monte is the closest equivalent I can come to. There was more motion than the temperature and humidity could accommodate. We are finally in that shirt-sticky time in Washington when the black interior of the autos bake the back of your suit into deep wrinkles and the road shimmers and the lines of strong storms roll over in the afternoon.
One of them developed a swirl and dropped a little F1-strength tornado north of town the other night. It was a small one by Great Plains standards, but all the more startling since it was out of the blue. Huge trees were ripped up and thrown across houses.
Nobody got killed, thank goodness, but it's passage across six miles of ground made me wonder about the randomness of what comes out of the sky.
It is a little like the US Senate pulling an all-nighter, like they did last night, as if Senator Byrd was going to rack out on one of the camp-beds they hauled into the anterooms off the august chamber.
Hillary Clinton appeared at 0430, not long after I finished talking to Australia on my last act of a long day. She is running for President, which accounts for the timing, I think. Senator Byrd was asleep.
Senate Majority Leader Reid said he wanted to stop the war, and I don't know if he stayed up to see if they did. The whole thing seemed highly unlikely, but it is the season for these sorts of gestures.
It makes me long for the time when the heat and humidity drove the legislators out of town and theatre is what happened in the summer stock.
Secretary Chertoff is partly responsible for all this. I think it started with the Glasgow bombing, and the almost car-bombs in London. The Secretary seemed candid when he said he had a “gut feeling” that some terrorist act might come out of the blue and whack us.
It seemed like an actual application of common sense, which is a gaffe in public life. Our leaders expect us to believe that they believe the most highly unlikely things. Now that the new National Intelligence Estimate is out, we can understand why Mr. Chertoff said what he did in Chicago. He must have been reviewing the almost-final draft of the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), which just popped out and has everyone all abuzz.
These don't come along that often, and this one is part of the new, streamlined process that is supposed to make the estimates more useful to policymakers, who get the classified version, and the rest of us who get the unclassified gist of the real thing.
An NIE is a curious thing. It is not an operational document that is supposed to galvanize action. It is an intensely coordinated document, which is to say a product of compromise. In my experience, the things have been so watered down that they are pretty useless.
This one is interesting, since it reflects the new spirit of cooperation and sharing that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence is trying to jam down the throats of the sixteen agencies that theoretically work for him.
I went through the document this morning, and don't know quite what to make of it. It takes eight pages of administrative junk to get to the key judgments. It takes a page or two to describe under what authorities it was produced, and has a fabulous descriptive page that describes the real meaning of the analytical jargon in the paper.
It actually reads like a handbook. There is a bar chart across the top of the page that has the terms across the top that we are used to hearing and then defines them. It is very useful. The paper says “We do not intend the term “unlikely” to imply an event will not happen.”
So unlikely- like the tornado the other night- doesn't mean it is not going to happen. The paper uses the terms “probably” and “likely” to indicate there is a greater than even chance that something might happen, presumably in the near term.
Then there is the ominous disclaimer: “We use words such as “we cannot dismiss,” “we cannot rule out,” and “we cannot discount” to reflect an unlikely-or even remote-event whose consequences are so awful that the possibility has to be mentioned.
That all took eight pages to get to, but I suppose the paper is a bit of a tutorial to get us average folks prepared, since there are some common sense observations in the last two pages of the NIE, which do not appear highly unlikely at all.
I'll summarize them for you and save you some time:
We face a persistent and evolving terrorist threat over the next three years. The Bad Guys are going to adapt and improve their capabilities. Some progress has been made, but high impact plots continue. Al-Qa'ida has people here. They would really like to whack us in the most visible and excruciating manner.
There is more, of course, with a lot of nuance and use of terms ranging from “likely” to “cannot rule out,” which refers to our domestic single-issue nutcases.
It is all just common sense, and in that regard it is a breath of fresh air. In this town, candor of that sort is as unexpected and unlikely as a bolt from the blue.
Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com