Il sito dei nostri Servizi ha pubblicato venerdì un interessantissimo saggio della dott.ssa Francesca Tortorella sulla ristrutturazione dei processi analitici dell’Intelligence Community post undici settembre. Un’analisi, quella dell’autrice,  che muovendo dai due principali casi di fallimento – l’undici settembre, appunto, e la ben nota vicenda delle armi di distruzione di massa iraqene – ripercorre gli aspetti più significativi dell’Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act (IRTPA), la legge di riforma, ed il suo reale impatto sull’analisi di intelligence statunitense negli anni 2000.
Scrive Francesca Tortorella nelle conclusioni:

This research showed that, while the reform has generated many improvements, there are some remaining obstacles that prevent the analytic community to operate successfully.
The magnitude of the challenges renders recommendations hard to make. However, addressing the intelligence-policy relationship may be the starting point and the key to solving the remaining issues described.
Educating the policymakers about what analysis can and cannot do might address effectively the misunderstandings in the intelligence-policy relationship.
The IC has neglected the education of its customers: the appointed and elected officials.
Additionally, policymakers with little knowledge about the IC often found themselves being frustrated with their attempts to get the right kind of intelligence support.
The quality of service policymakers receive from the IC is directly related to the degree of expertise and experience that the former have with the intelligence world. Policymakers who are better informed on how best to specify and articulate their needs will impact positively on the analysts’ performance. Colin Powell said, about his interaction with the IC: «An old rule that I’ve used with my intelligence officers over the years […] goes like this: Tell me what you know. Tell me what you don’t know. And then, based on what you really know and what you really don’t know, tell me what you think it’s most likely to happen. […] Now, when you tell me what’s most likely to happen, then I, as the policymaker, have to make a judgment as to whether I act on that, and I won’t hold you accountable for it because that is a judgment; and judgments of this kind are made by policymakers, not intelligence experts.»
This statement is a paradigmatic example of what every policymaker should be receiving from the IC. They need to know what the IC can tell them about an issue, and need to understand the limits of what the IC knows about that particular issue. A good analytic product is one that has forced analysts to think through the implications of their data, discuss the significance of facts and evidence, and make explicit their level of confidence.