On Action and Decisions by the Intelligence Consumer

Abstract

This chapter demonstrates how the nature of the threat, the political situation during the Clinton years, the problem of induction and the fact that intelligence as a phenomenon was not properly understood combined to create a cognitive climate in which the threat became increasingly challenging to comprehend within the limits of inductive logic. This situation could develop because the interplay between the threat and the problem of induction facilitated cognitive closure, and it was when the consequence of this interplay interacted with secrecy and intelligence tribal language that discourse failure evolved. The final result was that the decision-makers did not manage to analyse the situation and the threat properly, and they thus did not have a language that was sophisticated and precise enough to communicate the complexity of the threat from al Qaeda. The Clinton and Bush administrations therefore became cognitively and politically handicapped and could thus not implement effective policy.