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The limits of power (2)

21 July 2003

Information is only as good as the assessment that is made of it, but an assessment does not itself make the information true. No amount of power can make it true, either.

The choice presented to allied governments by their occupation of Iraq (the column 14 July - The limits of power (1) would be less stark if the war itself had nor been such an optional affair. Neither Bush nor Blair was obliged by circumstances or political pressures to place their futures in the hands of a foreign and alien people over whom they had so little control. Now, in the absence of the notorious weapons of mass destruction, if the decision to go to war is not to appear woefully misconceived the governments need a palpably successful political (which means economic and social) outcome for Iraq. Bush will struggle in 2004 if his soldiers are still being picked of at the rate of over one a day; Blair may not make it to 2005 unless his own side can bring themselves to forgive him for his association with a failed venture. Which makes it all the more pertinent how the two leaders got themselves into this sublime mess in the first place.

Part of the answer, and highly topical at present, is the relationship of the two leaders to the information they used to support their decisions. Information is slippery stuff; so-called intelligence information is slipperier than most, as intelligence professionals well understand. Information, by definition, is intended to inform, but it only becomes objective when considered together with its provenance and context. These, as the information is passed on, themselves become the objective elements to which the information itself has only a relative association.

For example: I tell you (on the telephone from London) "The sky is blue". You know the date and time and you may also know me by the sound of my voice. You may or not know me well enough to judge my reliability as a witness.

You now know (objectively) that on a certain day at a certain time I said (from London) that the sky is blue. You met a friend later who asks "What news?"

Do you say "The sky is blue"? That may surprise your friend if, in your own locality, it happens to be raining. Do you say "The sky is blue in London"? Or might you not more accurately say "An acquaintance called from London at 10.30 this morning to say the sky was blue".

Your friend now knows (objectively) that on a certain day at a certain time you said that, according to an acquaintance speaking from London at 10.30 this morning, the sky was blue.

The important thing to note is that in relation to the core information (the sky is blue... ) your friend is much less well placed than you are to judge its accuracy. You yourself cannot know for certain; you have to make a judgement based on what you know about me. Your friend has similarly to make a judgement about you, but, even if he thinks you to be entirely honest, that doesn't tell him how reliable I am. Your friend may also think you to be a fine judge of other people, but he's now dependent upon his two separate judgements of you and your original judgement of me being correct, if he is to receive accurate information.

As it travels down the chain the accuracy of the information does not change. There either was or was not blue sky over London at 10.30 on that day and I either did or did not say so. What does change rapidly is the ability of subsequent recipients of information to make reliable judgements as to whether or not the original information was accurate. It also becomes rapidly more difficult to work out more subtle things such as what my original statement might have meant but did not say. Was it a metaphor for something else? Was it correctly understood (or even heard)?

All these things are impossible to know, which only matters if someone down the line wants to use the information as the basis for a decision. If your friend (or your friend's friend) is heading for London and wants to know whether to take an umbrella they will need to assess the usefulness of what they have been told.

Intellectually speaking, this is a dangerous process requiring great care. A common pitfall is that the person making the assessment uses other things they know (or think they know) to assess the new information, and they end up interpreting it in the light of what they already know. The consequence is that all the information becomes self-referential and starts to point the same way. So: somebody said it never rains in London and somebody else heard a weather forecast predicting a heat-wave over all of Europe. Clearly, therefore, my statement "the sky is blue" was intended to signify that the weather in London is set fair.

This tendency, to make diverse and uncorroborated pieces of evidence support each other, is particularly prevalent in circles where uncertainty is not an option. This can be said of journalism (driven by the need for a story, to a deadline) and of politics where "not knowing" and the associated lack of decisiveness are considered signs of weakness and ineptitude. The consequence of this is that decisions come to be made on the basis of weak evidence and, because they cannot subsequently be changed, all further evidence is interpreted as supporting them.

It is a failing to which the powerful are particularly prone, because of all people they are the least tolerant of a state of ignorance that seems to question their power. Similarly, when they are discovered to have acted on information that was wrong, their sense of their own power does not permit them either to admit the error or to make the appropriate policy adjustment. The difficulty they are faced with, however, of a policy that no longer fits the facts of the case and is doomed to fail, does not go away. The wrong information persists in its wrongness, in defiance of the powerful and beyond the reach of their power. Because the one thing that they cannot do is to make the information true.

Information may be assessed wrongly by mistake. The assessment may be plausible and the fact that it appears to fit with other information may increase that plausibility. Or it may be assessed wrongly on purpose, which does not necessarily mean that a false construction is placed on it. It is more likely to mean that a construction is placed upon it that is not known to be false (it may be thought to be true) but which the assessor knows is not a construction that can reasonably be placed on the information before him.

This latter tendency is becoming dangerously fashionable. It dictated the argument about weapons of mass destruction because almost nobody who was not a specialist doubted that Iraq had such weapons. The intelligence trail, therefore, was a search not for objective truth but for evidence to substantiate a known fact. It quite literally did not occur to the politicians and their political advisors that the difficulty in finding such evidence ought to throw into question the "known fact" itself.

It is a thought that the inmates of Guantanamo may usefully ponder in their quieter moments. They are being held because the U.S. government "knows" them to be guilty men. But they are held outside any legal jurisdiction because no jurisdiction exists in which that "knowledge" would withstand the close inquiry of an objective mind. The power of the U.S. government is almost absolute in relation to these men. But it is not quite so absolute as to make them guilty of crimes unrecognised in any jurisdiction, or even of crimes that they did not commit.