"Spies, torture and terrorism: The dark pursuit of the truth"

Source: The Economist, July 30th 2009

I quote a long passage from the article:

People familiar with the inner workings of intelligence suggest a more ambiguous story. Intelligence, they argue, is about piecing together fragments of information and building up spider diagrams of connections between suspects. “Intelligence is grains of sand; you don’t usually get the whole beach,” says one veteran.

It is true that in 2001, a time when the CIA and other agencies were woefully ignorant of al-Qaeda’s methods, the prisoners captured after the overthrow of the Taliban were the first rich source of information to help “map the enemy”, as one intelligence source puts it. But, says a former counter-terrorism official, the most valuable information from Mr Zubaydah’s capture came not from his interrogation but from his address book. With Mr Mohammed, says another analyst, the most important factor in stopping further attacks on America was not what the terrorist said under duress, but that he had been captured in the first place.

Intelligence officials maintain that detainees under interrogation provided as many, perhaps more, specks of information as other sources of intelligence on terrorism, including signals and agents. The question that nobody can answer is how much of this could have been obtained without torture.

Let me juxtapose this information with Ben Bernanke's statements on the way the Federal Reserve makes decision (in an interview on PBS News Hour). He said he receives economic reports many times a day and receives anecdotal information filtered up through the Federal Reserve Banks such as opinions of key informants. There is a very strong staff which provides analysis and interpretation. And the decisions are made by a panel of experts, representing the regional staffs, each supported by an expert staff. He pointed out that there is no one indicator that serves to tell the Fed what will happen in the economy and what needs to be done. Rather it is necessary to see the big picture provided by all this data and analysis to draw conclusions.

We know that even the Fed is sometimes wrong, in spite of the importance of their decisions and the seriousness of the decision process.

In both the intelligence business and the economic policy business the key to success is getting a huge amount of information, doing extensive analysis, bringing together a critical mass of experts, and using good group decision making to try to understand the big picture, recognize its critical aspects, and to identify the best alternative decisions.

How seldom do we take decision making comparably seriously, even for important decisions in our personal or business lives.