A Guy’s View: Information and governance
Owing to our love of partisan politics, we focus a lot on Government: who is in and who wants to get in. Too little emphasis is placed on governance.
Governance, as used here, does not refer to power as much as it does to the management of resources. It is impossible to properly deploy or otherwise deal with state resources without adequate information.
In recent times, we have moved away from the Westminster philosophy of a civil service which emphasises service to the country and its people, the complexion of the holders of Government office notwithstanding. Instead, we have plunged into obstructionism or support, depending on our political perspective.
Successful governance depends entirely on good information. If functionaries refuse to communicate vital information in a timely manner, or pass on false information, it becomes impossible to govern.
When specialised agencies are fed poor intelligence, they are prone to collapse. Their decisions will be based on faulty data, which renders them near useless.
It has been the strategy of some parties to infiltrate key groups in the society and seek to control them and the information they put out, either to the public or to those who depend on their information to make decisions. This is a sure way to guarantee chaos when you are not in office and the greatest support when you are the decision maker.
Some politicians, in positions of governance, fail to have enough respect for the importance of information. They do not appreciate that the information which they are given to work with determines the success of their projects and programmes. As a result, they are likely to pursue programmes that are ill-advised. They are given the tools to dig their own graves.
In regard to the appreciation of information, intelligence, Donald Trump is an interesting case study. According to all of the intelligence agencies in the United States, there is no doubt that he was elected President of that country as a result of Russian cyber activity. This creates a major problem for Mr. Trump, because it means that he is an illegitimate President.
His response is one for the text books. President elect Trump decided to attack the intelligence agencies that collected the information which confirmed his illegitimacy. He asserted that their information is suspect and he is sceptical of it. According to him, he has sources of information that no one else has, and his secret sources lead him to doubt that it was the Russians who hacked into Democratic Party information and put out false news reports from which he benefited. He believes that Vladimir Putin is a smart man, but he had nothing to do with the manipulation of the American electorate and election.
In spite of his strange reasoning, Mr. Trump understands that he cannot govern without information, intelligence. But having disparaged all of the intelligence agencies in his country, he has announced that he will overhaul the intelligence infrastructure. This decision has been made before he examined how they work or developed an understanding of their procedures.
Interestingly, Mr. Trump has presented no reasonable basis on which he has concluded that the intelligence agencies are unreliable. His smoking gun was the conclusion of the intelligence community that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction when there were none. It seems beyond Mr. Trump to understand that that information was manufactured to justify war and was not necessarily a reflection of faulty intelligence.
Neither has he given any indication of what will be the features of the big changes which he intends to make in those agencies. Here is a perfect, if unfortunate, example of how political power taints legitimate governance.
This is an important subject for us here in Barbados. I do not believe that I am betraying any secrets by stating that there is a possibility that the Barbados Government, and a number of specialised agencies, “benefit” from American intelligence. One now has to draw attention to the word benefit, for if Mr. Trump is correct about the American intelligence agencies, then the intelligence that may be received in Barbados becomes suspect and may not be beneficial after all.
The US State Department puts out information for the world to read about sectors of our society. This serves as a means of information for Government, citizens and investors in that country about the social and economic climate in Barbados. State Department information is also interrogated and relied on by other agencies and researchers which use this information to inform their attitudes towards Barbados.
It is from such publications that Barbados has come to be labelled as a transhipment point for drugs destined for other countries. This has been often repeated, so no one now questions whether this is indeed a fact. There are many similar publications.
Under close examination by a US Senate Committee, the leaders of the intelligence community confessed that theirs is a community of human beings who make mistakes. When do we know when the information they make public is the result of solid intelligence, or mistaken conclusions? Certainly, the President elect does not have a lot of confidence in his country’s intelligence gatherers. So why should we?
The entities in Barbados that depend on US intelligence must now re-examine the confidence they place in this information. One suspects that this could have implications for all levels of our governance structure. Unless Donald Trump should be ignored.
There is a good chance that Mr. Trump could just be a child handling a sharp edged tool. However, if he has such scant respect for the US intelligence community as to be willing to restructure it because he does not like its findings, this might indicate that this collection of operatives is not sacrosanct and may be little more than a political tool in the hands of that country’s leadership.
So how will their local partners respond to this information?