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My new book, Still Broken, recounts my time working as an intelligence officer for the Defense Intelligence Agency, from the halls of the Pentagon to the palaces of Baghdad. It addresses the strategic shortcomings in our efforts to defend this country from enemies overseas, from explaining how the Bush administration continues to mismanage the war in Iraq and turn our intelligence efforts into an ineffective political apparatus to describing my first-hand experience dealing with detainees likely guilty only of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
I wrote the book because I think it is important that people know the truth about what is happening with our military and intelligence structures in Washington and in Iraq, and I think there are too few reality-based voices speaking out about these issues. In particular, one of the greatest challenges to an informed national dialogue on Iraq is the lack of accurate and insightful news from much of the mainstream media, especially conservative outlets. In the following excerpt, a part of the conclusion of the book, I explain how the media appeared to me while I was inside the system, and what might be done to improve the information flow.
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Most Americans remain unaware of the depth and breadth of the ongoing problems in the intelligence community, and even of just how bad things are in Iraq. To some extent, the lack of information about the changes in U.S. intelligence and military strategy is directly related to the dearth of news reporting on these issues. It is difficult to find credible, timely, and relevant news on Iraq, and even on intelligence and military policy in general. I was one of very few analysts who augmented classified reporting with unclassified information, and I was constantly scouring the media for insightful information. Television news was unhelpful, as always, a flow of talking heads with little knowledge and even less interest in getting into details or subtleties. Print media was inconsistent at best.
For whatever reason, the television idea of "balance" was, for a long time, to report casualties on our side (Bad News) and reconstruction or casualties on their side (Good News). There was even a grim cyclical nature to the reports; invariably we could count on "School Built in Iraq" to become, a few weeks later, a casualty report: "3 Coalition Soldiers, 18 Iraqis Dead in New School Blast." Broadcast media also reported major events, such as elections, government formation, and particularly relevant statements, but rarely explained the "how" and "why" along with the "what." Some long-form TV news managed to address some of the finer points, but mostly television presented a flood of events without context. And in any case, most people can read faster than others can talk, so people can consume far more news in print form than through broadcast, making TV doubly useless.
In turning to print media, I would at least peruse mainstream news outlets: The New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times,and magazines such as Time and Newsweek.There was some value there, but they, too, often reported events without conextual explanation. So if I read a piece about the latest surge in Shia-Sunni violence in the Times, the same story with minor variations was often repeated in all the major outlets. Still, I skimmed several corporate media websites every day: CNN, MSNBC, NY Times, the Post, LA Times, and Fox News, among others, to get a sense of the news cycle. Some commentators, primarily political conservatives, have criticized corporate media for neglecting to cover the good news in Iraq, but I found that the larger problem was not that the media didn't cover the good news, but that it did not cover much of anything of real depth in Iraq. While the debate went on over whether the media spent too much time reporting on casualties, a civil war raged. While the media dutifully reported the drafting of the Iraqi constitution, it failed to explain the many problems the document would likely cause. And so on.
The answer to the search for news both current and analytical, I found, often lay in nontraditional online media. Among corporate media, often the most interesting and helpful articles were op-eds, which actually took the time to proffer assessment of the news rather than just transcription of events. Some were better than others -- I avoided Tom Friedman like the plague, for example, but regularly read Fareed Zakaria -- but they were the best place to get unique and insightful perspectives on Iraq, the Middle East, and the so-called War on Terror. The logical extension of op-eds in traditional media was to online magazines and blogs. There were former intelligence professionals, professors, think-tank fellows, and people actually in the countries I worked on who wrote regularly online, and I sought out the best ones to inform my thinking, for both general knowledge and professional analysis.
The world of online news and analysis is as close as it gets to a true meritocracy. There is an advantage to being first, but if the writing is insightful, prescient, and/or entertaining, it finds an audience. Sometimes that audience is niche, to be sure, but I was stunned at the amount of interesting and helpful online writing on topics I needed to know about. I was already reading blogs on domestic politics, just for fun, and while in Iraq I made a serious effort to add foreign policy and Iraq-specific blogs to my reading list.
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Alex Rossmiller is the author of "Still Broken: A Recruit's Inside Account of Intelligence Failures, from Baghdad to the Pentagon" (Presidio Press).
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