Divided
by common language
by Paul Reynolds, BBC 16 jul 2004
George Bernard Shaw, who said that "England and America are two countries divided by a common language", would have had a field day with the two reports just issued on Iraq and the missing weapons of mass destruction. The reports, from the US Senate Intelligence Committee and from the British inquiry headed by Lord Butler, had similar messages - that intelligence about Iraq was a mess. But one was delivered like a trumpet and the other like a flute. And while the one said that all were at fault and all were to blame, the other said that all were at fault and no one was to blame.
US way v UK way. No prizes for guessing which was which. You can understand now why the CIA Director George Tenet has resigned and the head of the British Joint Intelligence Committee John Scarlett has been promoted. There is an American way of doing things and there is a British way. There are two reasons for this. The first is institutional. The Senate is independent of the US government. It loves criticising agencies of the government. It did so, for example, after Pearl Harbour, forcing resignations from senior military commanders. The Butler panel was drawn from across the British establishment. Such bodies are loath to criticise their fellows, other than in measured tones. Sometimes, as in the Franks report into the Argentine invasion of the Falklands in 1982, they do not criticise at all.
'Cautious style'. The second difference is linguistic. In the American report the language is decisive. Decoding British officialese is an art form and getting it wrong can be dangerous The Senate Committee went straight at it: "Most of the major key judgments in the Intelligence Community's October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), "Iraq's Continuing programs for Weapons of Mass destruction", either overstated, or were not supported by, the underlying intelligence reporting." It went on: "The failure of the Intelligence Community to accurately analyse and describe the intelligence in the NIE was the result of a combination of systemic weaknesses, primarily in analytic trade craft, compounded by a lack of information sharing, poor management and inadequate intelligence collection." There is no such overall conclusion in the Butler report. It is written in the cautious style of the British official document (with never a split infinitive, of course).
To compare: The Senate Committee, when criticising the CIA assessment that "Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons", says that the statement "overstated... what was known... Intelligence analysts did not have enough information to state with certainty that Iraq 'has' these weapons". The British report, addressing the same problem, makes an excuse for the Joint Intelligence Committee before coming to a softer conclusion: "Partly because of inherent difficulties in assessing chemical and biological programmes, JIC assessments on Iraq's chemical and biological weapons programmes were less assured."
No punch thrown. There are lots of phrases like "less assured" in the Butler report. The failure by the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) to check on its agents in Iraq, three of whom were unreliable and two of whom were not listened to, is explained as "weaknesses in the effective application by SIS of its validation procedures". You have to learn to decode this kind of writing. When you do so, you find that, underneath, it can be hard hitting. The rule is that understatement rules.
What is significant about the Butler report is that there are so many of these cautious criticisms that they accumulate into a pretty damning comment on the performance of the intelligence services, the Joint Intelligence Committee and the government. But it is overlaid with reassurances about people acting in good faith and with the best intentions ("we have found no evidence of deliberate distortion or of culpable negligence" etc.) so the punch that is being threatened is never thrown. Decoding British officialese is an art form and getting it wrong can be dangerous.
Once in Brussels, with tongue-in cheek, I advised a European diplomat never to be optimistic if a British official said in a meeting that he "could not completely agree with" such and such a proposal. This meant, I said, that he completely disagreed with it.
L'articolo tradotto in Italiano.
by www.osservatoriosullalegalita.org
___________
I CONTENUTI DEL SITO POSSONO ESSERE PRELEVATI CITANDO E LINKANDO LA FONTE