Fabricated nonsense

Manipulation requires intelligent handling of stupidity and gullibility. Thereby hangs the tale of the now infamous fabricated cables.

Most scribes for this newspaper believe the story was planted by an agency, normally an amorphous reference to Inter-Services Intelligence. They are likely right. But some have wondered how the agency could be so stupid as to plant an obvious non-starter. In this they are wrong — for the most part.

The collective intelligence quotient of inter-services mayn’t exactly be on a par with that of the faculty at Harvard, but neither does it go through the floor. In fact, within the constraints of organisation theory — namely that all large bureaucratic organisations suffer from bounded rationality and systematic stupidity — the ISI can do its work fairly efficiently. Organisational constraints mean that efficient, operational working is not always the product of wise, strategic thinking. Hence the requirement to subject all large organisations to independent, external scrutiny.

So, the most important question is to see what the objective of this exercise could be — i.e., who were/are the target audience and what must be fed to them? Remember the fake Niger papers, the British dodgy dossier on Iraq, parts of which were plagiarised from a student’s paper, and the 45-minute activation nonsense? Information was fixed after a decision to go to war had been made.

Many discerning analysts scrubbed the information and found it in-actionable and disingenuous. But the exercise was not done for them, or for the Iraqis or the Muslim world. It was done to prepare the public in Britain, Europe and the US. I was at the Brookings Institution in Washington DC in the run-up to the war and witnessed how the public’s mind was being prepared and how the media was co-opted. Ultimately, when the chips went down, the newspapers began to offer their mea culpas.

In the case of the fabricated cables too, the planters of the story were not really bothered about those who are wary of such stuff anyway. It is meant for those who would swallow it hook, line and sinker. At the minimum, if such dissembling begins to cast a doubt on the entire cable leaks exercise, the attempt would be worth making.

Analysts and politicians have been regularly talking rubbish about WikiLeaks on the idiot box, claiming it is a grand American conspiracy. Once the issue is confused so badly and charlatans are in play, space is always created for feeding more nonsense to the people. In this case, the plant relied on existing biases and the same people who were talking about an American conspiracy also began talking about Indian perfidy!

Please note that the ability to pull off such a stunt in terms of reaching out to the target audience is no measure of whether it is intelligent to actually do this. That is a separate debate and involves examining the existing security paradigm and the threat perception that sustains it. The damage is obvious: very few will now even accept that which is correct about India’s activities. The other aspect relates to our practice of journalism. The competition to put the story out on the one hand, and declining standards in the newsrooms on the other, ensured that no one would bother himself with fact-checking.

Online, the agency which wired the story, is known in the business to be dodgy. And yet, the story went through several stages unverified. This newspaper has had the decency to print an apology, which is commendable. But the apology does not take care of streamlining the internal systems that failed to detect the plant. That requires taking other measures.

Interestingly, the argument that the nature of the story and the breathless desire to run it were responsible for stretching the system can be as effectively used to press the opposite point — that when a newspaper gets a story like that, it should have more cause to be cautious about running it because the fall, if it gets it wrong, will be steeper.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 14^th, 2010.