Clark

I gave a lecture in my policy process course in which I discussed the appearance of Richard Clark before the 9/11 commission. The general topic of the lecture was to contrast the Rational Actor model of organizational decision making with the Bounded Rationality, or Agenda setting model of organizational decision making. I thought this part of the lecture might be interesting in light of the recent 9/11 commission report:

For now lets look at how this can be useful for analyzing when things go wrong. Typically people tend toward the rational actortional actor view of catastrophes. At one extreme it leads us to look for conspirational actorcies. There is a sort of assumption of omnipotence engendered by the rational actor model. So in the rational actor model bad things happen because powerful people want them to happen.
A less extreme version is to look for incompetence/heroes explanation of events. Something bad happens and you look for the cause in someone who didn’t do their job and the solution that someone at the top should have paid more attention. This reaction is typical to catastrophic events. After Pearl Harbor several admirals were fired. I think that this reaction is usually wrong.
I think the agenda-setting approach leads us to ask if the problem wasn’t people not doing their jobs but just the opposite—doing their jobs too well. The political scientist is often inclined to the systemic failure model. Under this model the problem is that everyone is doing their job, it is just that their jobs are designed to achieve contradictory goals.
The agenda setting model sees the government as rational actor at the subunit level but possibly ‘irrational actor’ at the level of the entire government. You can’t make rational trade-offs, say, between civil liberties and security, not wanting to treat people as ‘categories’ and wanting to detect crimes before they occur, babies and B1 bombers (Infant mortality and danger of nuclear attack), so you divide up these problems. You let one department be in charge of one goal pursue that exclusively and, therefore, rationally.
The amazing thing is that two guys got on the plane that were on the terrorist watch list. The CIA didn’t let out the information to the rest of the government about the extra information they had on these guys. Moreover a Minnesota FBI agent had information that single men from Arab countries were taking flying lessons but curiously had no interest in learning to land. This information was not even shared within the FBI, let alone followed up on.
Clarke suggests that the solution was to have a principle’s meeting where the President would get together with the top people and knock heads together. This is the heroic model, guy at the top makes people lower down do their jobs.
But the reason you have a terrorist watch list is for watching out for them to become routine. The agencies deliberately kept their information secret, sometimes over the objections of the field officers.
What I think is more likely to be productive is to look at it in terms of agencies having conflicting definitions of the problem. The CIA is an agency that looks at itself as fighting a war against foreign enemies. Its job is to spy on those enemies without their knowledge so they can be killed. The FBI as a law enforcement agency. Their job is to not harass citizens unless they have a complaint of a crime. This necessarily means waiting till a crime has occurred. More recently we have added a constraint to the FBI’s job that it not subject citizens to investigations on the basis of some general quality which has no direct relation (as opposed to a possible statistical relation) to criminal conduct. In other words, no profiling. Now the problem is that all the things that are good for accomplishing one set of goals undermines the achieving the other set of goals.
The CIA wants to keep information secret. If the enemy knows what we know they can figure out how we know it and prevent us from finding out more. They want to stop the enemy before he does something so they engage in probabilistic searches. They look at individuals based on their group charational actorcteristics and don’t worry about if they are offended by it or not—they aren’t citizens and the idea is to observe people without them knowing it anyway.
The FBI wants to gather evidence in open court to convince citizens that the accused has had a fair trial. It waits to act until their has been a crime—citizens are assumed innocent until proven guilty. It does not investigate people because of their membership in broad groups but only if they have specific information.
The CIA and FBI are not being petty when they don’t cooperational actorte, they are being rational actortional (at the level of the sub-organization at least). The FBI has learned that sharing information with the CIA will screw up its cases: not only does evidence gathered illegally have to be thrown out often the burden of proof is on the government to show that even legally gathered evidence was not in some way the indirect result of illegally gathered evidence. The CIA has learned that cooperating with the FBI is bad. The FBI’s use of intercepted cell phone transmissions from around the world to the WTC bombers was convincing evidence to the court of the defendant’s guilt. It was also convincing evidence to Al Qeada that using cell phones was a bad idea.
The point is not that Clarke is wrong. More meetings probably would have helped. But relying on the people at the very top to attend to every potential crisis is probably not the most efficient solution. It is probably particularly damaging to look for individuals to blame.
Looking for individuals at the bottom leads to bureaucrats protecting themselves with formal rules and procedures. The reason that the Minnesota FBI agents suggestions were not followed up on was that the FBI had instituted procedures to protect itself as the result of the last big thing it got in trouble for: profiling. FBI officers’ careers were put in jeopardy from this scandal and so procedures and paper-work were instituted to prevent investigations that might lead to profiling charges. The problem is these procedures worked. If the investigation had taken place the hijackers would probably have been alerted and gone home. The plot would have been prevented but the FBI would have been accused, probably correctly, of ethnic profiling (would they have investigated if they had been Swedes?).
The drive for "openness" as the solution for all problems has lead to a hero’s welcome for Clark. But I suspect that if the experience in Congress is any guide Mr. Clark’s actions will lead to there being less information about what our leaders do.
There is no precedent for a career civil servant reporting on the President during his term in office like this. We know a little more now than we did before about the decision making process at the White House (but nothing, I suspect, that truly surprises anyone who has followed the administration); it is certainly useful to know that even within days of 9/11 Bush wanted to know if Iraq was somehow implicated. But what the WH and all future WH’s have learned is be careful who you ask questions. Don’t ask a question that years later could be portrayed in a bad light. Or, if you must ask, make sure it is someone in your own political party whose loyalty you can be sure of. I think the Clark episode can only lead to Presidents requesting less information from a narrower range of sources. Sadly, the tradition of non-partisan civil servants as advisors on potentially politically sensitive questions is probably at an end. Surely not a result that will make us safer in the long run.