Middle East Meltdown: Failures of Intelligence

Is your intelligence failing? How would you know? Would you admit it?

“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.”

―Karl Rove

Consider Rove’s words from two perspectives: as an individual and as a nation state actor.

The present conflict between Israel and Palestine should force anyone to first stop and think about what they think reality is before they succumb to the urge to render judgement on any version of reality.

If one cannot do this, what is the validity of one’s judgement?

Reality is not some immutable truth that is undeniable by all. It is a subjective manifestation of information, knowledge and experience within one’s given purview and context. As such, it is subjective. Reality is not truth.

If you believe that you have access to truth from any side regarding the immediate conflict, VST would politely suggest you are wrong. In no way does it serve a given side’s interests to tell the truth in this “war” or any other. Interest is served by delivering a narrative to potentially generate a version of reality that is sympathetic to one’s side and therefore the achievement of one’s political and military objectives.

As we have always said, the onus is on the individual to treat all information with equal contempt and somehow discern degrees of truth amongst it in order to attempt to construct possible glimpses of reality. The test of such efforts lies in the ability to predict future outcomes while passing back tests. If you read a report, accept that as truth and take one’s opinion from it without the will to set a future and past test, no cognitive process is taking place. You are simply being told what to think and believe.

The Question of Israeli Intelligence Failure

This question is being asked in every channel, and every man and his dog is willing to parrot the question and rush to an answer.

If one has zero idea about what intelligence is, how it works, its flaws and strengths, and the different approaches of one intelligence service to another, what is both the point and the validity of one’s opinion on the matter? Why assume the question or one’s attempt to answer it is valid?

A crude basic logic runs thus:

• Mossad is one of the greatest and most capable intelligence services on the planet.

• The Israeli military is one of the greatest forces on the planet.

• The West Bank and Gaza are the most heavily surveilled and policed places on the planet, fully penetrated by Mossad.

• Therefore, it is impossible to entertain that Israel didn’t detect yesterday’s attacks.

• Therefore, the attacks must have somehow been fomented or tolerated in order to achieve a furtherance of Israel’s military and political objectives, where “Israel” could also refer to and/or include nations allied to Israel.

Consider then the opinion of Scott Ritter in his article, Israel’s Massive Intelligence Failure. A précis:

• Israel has suffered previous structural intelligence failures including, according to Ritter, “an over reliance on inductive reasoning and intuition and failing to use structured deductive methodology” that contributed to the Yom Kippur war.

• The subsequent Agranat Commission gave rise to the re-engineering of Israel’s approach to intelligence.

• Israel adopted “what is known as ‘Analysis of Competing Hypotheses.’

  This manifested itself in the development within AMAN of a culture of contrarian thinking, built around critical thinking designed to challenge unitary assessments and groupthink,” that included a “Doubting Thomas” check AKA a Red Team.

• In the case of the Yom Kippur war, “U.S. analysts — like their Israeli counterparts — had concluded there would be no attack” partly due to “over-reliance by U.S. analysts on Israel to know its own security posture; analysts being married to preconceived notions about Arab military capabilities; a tendency for plausible interpretation of the same evidence; and a failure by analysts to challenge the ‘rational actor’ fallacy.” Put another way, US intelligence was too willing to accept and too reliant on Israel’s own opinion of its security, suffered confirmation bias driven by that opinion, and certain dogmatic thinking. All of this worked together in a loop through the US and Israel, creating a systemic intelligence failure.

• The modified approach that came out of the Agranat Commission set Israel at odds with the CIA’s approach to intelligence, as Ritter directly experienced during his time as UNSCOM Chief Weapons Inspector in the run up to the Iraq War.

• The Israelis were interested in the truth of the real threat Iraq posed to Israel’s security, whereas the USA pursued a narrative that allowed it to achieve its political objective of the invasion of Iraq, which corrupted its intelligence products and their use.

• In the end, although Israel’s comprehensive analysis confirmed what was later admitted to be true - that Iraq had been disarmed and was not a threat to the world - it still capitulated to US political pressure and became complicit in America’s pursuit of its illegal invasion and political goal because Israel ultimately calculated that the fallout and consequences of going along with the USA was tolerably low for Israel.

• In recent times, Israel’s intelligence services - specifically Unit 8200 - have switched to an AI and algorithmic approach to intelligence that it claimed played a key role in the 2021 Operation Guardian of the Walls, which it publicised.

• Hamas, once aware of this approach, shifted tactics and gamed that system and approach to the point that yesterday’s attacks were possible against an unready and misinformed IDF.

Human nature being what it is, the same quip can be tragically applied to the Israeli military and intelligence services in the lead up to the 2023 Yom Kippur attacks by Hamas. It appears that the Israelis were singularly focused on the successes they enjoyed in the 2021 Operation Guardian Walls, and the role played by AI in bringing about that success.

Denied the benefit of the contrarian approach to analysis put in place in the aftermath of the Agranat Commission, Israel set itself up for failure by not imagining a scenario where Hamas would capitalize upon the Israeli over-reliance on AI, corrupting the algorithms in a way that blinded the computers, and their human programmers, to Hamas’ true intention and capability.

Hamas was able to generate a veritable Ghost in the Machine, corrupting Israeli AI and setting up the Israeli people and military for one of the most tragic chapters in the history of the Israeli nation.

Scott Ritter

If Ritter’s take is credible, what does that knowledge and information mean for your prior opinion of whether there has been an Israeli and US intelligence failure, and therefore whether yesterday’s attacks were fomented or tolerated in order to build a pretext of some kind?

Ritter’s take, if credible, should up end or even blow up the speculation that Israel and others have created and are orchestrating current events.

Now, watch this statement by Efrat Fenigson, a journalist who claims to have worked in Israeli intelligence 25 years ago. Jump to 3:45.

https://twitter.com/efenigson/status/1710716137044922585

Think carefully about what Fenigson is saying and how she packages it:

• My statement has legitimacy because 25 years ago I was in the Israeli intelligence force, although I will not explain what I did and what the service was then compared to today.

• I don’t talk about what the intelligence service is today.

• The border systems, protocols etc are such that it should have been impossible for such offensive manoeuvres to occur.

• The IDF had taken positions elsewhere due to intelligence about threats in those areas, at the expense of coverage where the attacks and incursions took place.

• The chain of events “is very strange”, pointing to deliberate conspiracy around corrupt political agendas and objectives, by a corrupt administration.

While Fenigson’s questions may well be fair, she wraps an assertion that Israel must have known about the Palestinians’ intent and actions inside false legitimacy that goes nowhere near the possibility that she has no clue about current Israeli intelligence operations and knowledge.

If she, a journalist with some kind of military intelligence background, is capable of and willing to engage in this kind of thinking and presentation to a mass audience, what are other people (in)capable of?

What I am getting at here is that the question of how Israel could suffer such an intelligence failure is loaded and beyond almost all people, journalists and outlets to answer meaningfully, let alone accurately. The only people who can accurately answer are those involved. The only people who can credibly speculate are those with prior experience and knowledge who are willing to clearly lay out that experience and knowledge. Those who are involved will never tell the truth about whether a failure occurred and its nature because they are operationally prevented from doing so and it doesn’t serve the interests of the intelligence services of Israel and its allies to do so.

Fenigson, therefore, makes a first order mistake: to make assertions about the events based on her prior assumption before first questioning her ability to credibly assume and therefore assert. What she then does is say that we should suspect that the Israeli government is at least knowingly tolerating the attacks as part of a wider deep state plan to cover up and/or distract from other internal issues. She is actively engaging in conspiracy theorising while denying being a conspiracy theorist without once entertaining the possibility of an intelligence failure, of which prior examples exist. Fenigson literally embodies the very kind of failure in her thinking that the Israelis made in the run up to the Yom Kippur war. In doing so, she is willing to seed potential narratives that, for those who just believe her, can become some form of internalised or externalised reality.

Why is this valid? Fenigson is not the only one doing this.

Scott Ritter may not be right, but at least he showed us his working out with reference to a version of history, all of which makes him easy to hold to account now and in the future. Ritter has literally attempted to educate his audience on the architecture of known Israeli intelligence and political failures since 1973.

Fenigson (and many, many others) have done nothing of the sort. They assert something based on incredulity and suspicion.

Carry all of the above into wider thinking, opinion, analysis, reporting and narratives. Woe betide anyone who thinks they have a handle on the realities of current events, let alone truth. That, in itself, is likely to be a failure of intelligence of a more fundamental and individual kind.

MUST WATCH

We cannot recommend highly enough Consortium News’ latest CNLive! show that features a full playthrough of John Pilger’s 2002 film Palestine Is Still the Issue, and the subsequent discussion with Pilger and Israeli historian, Ilan Pappé, on current events. It is essential viewing. One will see history repeating itself in front of one’s own eyes. Pilger is a journalist par excellence and his insight should be cherished.

https://consortiumnews.com/2023/10/09/watch-cn-live-john-pilger-ilan-pappe-on-palestine/