The New York Times on "Intelligence Ethics"

By now a few days ago, on January 28, the New York Times published this article (if it's still available online) on the question of a "moral compass" for the obtaining of intelligence by secret service agents in their operations. The occasion for this report is a conference on this topic taking place this weekend in Virginia, U.S. The question the article raises, more generally phrased, is whether or not moral justifications and limitations make sense at all within a field characterized by practices and missions that include operating under false names and pretenses and might include abduction and assassination in the service of intelligence gathering.

Former intelligence officer Clarridge, as the article cites, holds that "'intelligence ethics' is 'an oxymoron,' he said. 'It's not an issue. It never was and never will be, not if you want a real spy service.' Spies operate under false names, lie about their jobs, and bribe or blackmail foreigners to betray their countries, he said. 'If you don't want to do that," he added, "just have a State Department.'"

At first an observation about the presumption underlying Clarridge's statement: "spying is unethical, if a government still endorses it, then ethical quibbles and distinctions here are nonsensical at any rate." In other words, his position assumes that the moment that the strategies deployed in order to achieve a certain end are 'ethically questionable' then one can no longer make distinctions and argue for or against them in a way that would distinguish between better and worse choices.

It seems to me that holding to a stance that requires the purity of ethical strategies and ends, which amounts to a catergorical rejection of "dirty hands," only lead to an ethically justified retreat from politics evacuating the messy field of tussling over limits of actions to be taken and to be omitted.

Debates over the limits of what we might deem permissible and what we might deem inacceptable are necessary as long as there is a commitment to democratic politics. It is undercomplex and unhelpful, if one just retreats to the position that all deployment of violence and any questionable technique is bad anyway and thus nothing or anything is permitted.

Certainly this "we" is already a problem. Who is this collective after all that has this special connection to and investment in the ways that this or that secret service operates? And it seems to me that it is even possible and perhaps even sometimes necessary that one person can indeed hold present different and conflicting positions, change between them, revise each of them respective of the situation in which she or he is speaking and acting.

At the same time, it seems to me that the problem is more complicated than simply equipping the intelligence officers in the field with a "moral compass" as the article calls it, as if intelligence officers just needed a new set of principles. So while it is applaudable that former agents like Ms. Mahle call for a "more rigorous training in moral decision-making," the NYT article ends up presenting the issue at stake as only a question of the personal decision-making of intelligence officers without addressing the larger scope of the problem that the article itself raises at the beginning.

So it is definitely useful to train and foster officer's capability of raising moral issues and discerning the various aspects that precisely might give rise to moral problematics. But as the NYT article sets out, the issues to be debated at the conference are of much larger scope as well as of a different nature, the first one about a more general policy and the second one about legal backing of an individual's actions:

"Organizers said conferees would ponder such timely issues as how many civilian deaths can be justified in a C.I.A. Predator missile strike to kill a known terrorist, or what legal assurances a National Security Agency eavesdropper should demand before singling out the phone calls of an American who was linked to Al Qaeda."

The two issues presented here as moral quandaries are two very different aspects. What's intriguing are the presumption that are already in place before these formulations can be presented to us as questions of ethics.

In the first issue presented it seems that we have already settled on the fact that it is in principle possible that the death of one human being is a goal valued so highly that the deaths of a number of other human beings is justified (sic!). Some might argue that there is a difference between whether certain effects to an action are accepted and condoned and whether these effects are considered as justified. Same difference, just splitting hairs? For the moment I am only concerned about the reporting that forecloses rather than holding present the question of how the decision about this question might be made.

The second issue about the legal backing that an officer ought to demand strikes me as a strange way of phrasing a moral dilemma. What is framed as the moral issue is not the question whether or not citizens should be surveilled without obtaining a warrant first, whether or not an officer should follow or refuse to follow an order to eavesdrop without a warrant, but what kinds of legal assurances an officer should ask for.

What is happening in the NYT article is that on the one hand the question of intelligence ethics is presented as a question of personal ethics of intelligence officers, but the moral questions at stake are much larger and questions of the relation between ethics and politics that need to be addressed with regard to a much wider institutional framework as well.

As it is, addressed to a readership that is for the most part not involved in the government-sanctioned and -organized gathering of intelligence, the article ends up summoning sympathy for the difficulty of the situation that intelligence officers are in. And by this very movement, the article shirks away from providing information on these -- certainly timely and urgent -- issues in a way that would foster critical thinking.