Truth and Power

The importance of "speaking truth to power" was among topics debated in late April by three dozen scholars, journalists and government officials from four nations who gathered at Ditchley Park in the English countryside. It was a timely question, given the charges flying in both Britain and the United States about the shading of intelligence to support the invasion of Iraq.

Of great concern in British government circles is the growing presence of political appointees in positions of power. The British system has had many fewer politicians in executive branch positions than has the United States. Until recently, Cabinet ministers there haven't felt the need for political aides to shepherd policies that are, in the British parliamentary system, imposed by the ruling party with precious little consultation or oversight from the legislature. Advice on issues, including those involving sensitive intelligence, comes chiefly from the permanent civil service, whose top-ranked members occupy highly influential and widely respected roles in government.

When Tony Blair's Labor Party took over after many years in the wilderness, incoming Cabinet ministers felt they needed advisers sympathetic to the causes that animate Labor. So some 80 politically appointed "special advisers" now prowl the halls of Whitehall. Unlike our own phalanx of appointees, their roles are not well defined by historical practice or legislative mandate. Critics and the media view them as political toadies, and fear that they will tell their bosses only what they want to hear.

British critics see a problem with the U.S. system in this regard. At Ditchley, some said that President Bush was ill-served by Defense Department advisers who colored intelligence findings to help justify the invasion of Iraq.

Similar charges have surfaced since in the American press. Bush, as The New York Times noted on May 11, described in his State of the Union message a threat of up to 30,000 warheads, 500 tons of chemical weapons, 25,000 liters of anthrax and 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin. Some American experts, reported the Times, believe that such assertions may have been based on manufactured "intelligence" pieced together at the Pentagon to achieve political ends.

Just such an incendiary charge was leveled by journalist Seymour M. Hersh, writing in the May 12 issue of The New Yorker. According to Hersh, a small, pro-invasion group in the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans became President Bush's "main source of intelligence regarding Iraq's possible possession of weapons of mass destruction and connection with al Qaeda." Hersh writes that "the integrity of much of that intelligence is now in question."

Of course, the British themselves were embarrassed on the Iraq matter when the government released a pro-invasion intelligence assessment that turned out to be nothing more than an unpublished paper by a graduate student.

Both in Britain and in the United States, the solution to such problems seemed to be greater reliance on the permanent civil service. The CIA, whose director, George Tenet is the agency's only political appointee, won praise at Ditchley as a source of unbiased intelligence.

The conference at Ditchley Park was called to discuss the ethos and role of the public service. It was jointly sponsored by the Ditchley Foundation, started in 1958 to address important international concerns, and Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government.