How can Dean Barnett say this?

I'm a huge fan of Dean Barnett's blogging at Hugh Hewitt's site and I check in there three or four times a day. And he has a great gotcha today from HH's radio show, in which CIA guy Mark Lowenthal corrects Hugh by pointing out oh, at “the CIA we don’t guess. We estimate.”

I can see big problems in the intelligence infrastructure, and I can certainly see the humor in Lowenthal's rather pompous, if still valid*, distinction.

But I think Dean's way wrong about this:

AT SOME POINT DURING THE PRESIDENTIAL campaign, some eager candidate will probably make an issue over intelligence reform. The conversation will probably be less than edifying. It will avoid the central fact regarding the Central Intelligence Agency – the CIA more than anything else analyzes data. Where our enemies are concerned, the CIA doesn’t have much more raw data to analyze than the any [sic] curious and well informed American citizen inclined to do the same would have.

Dean's making a point that our actual human intelligence capabilities to report on al Qaeda or Iran's nuclear program just aren't there. Which is fair enough, as far as any of us know (remember, if we had a spy pouring Zawahiri's tea and another one changing Rafsanjani's bedsheets at night, we'd still say the same thing about not having good assets on the ground-- and also, I think a lot of other allied or "allied" or not at all allied governments like Sudan do have HUMINT resources and are taking up the slack a little bit).

But the notion that a CIA analyst doesn't have much more to work with than a well-informed citizen is way off base. Satellite intel, spyplanes, electronic monitoring, allied governments' dispatches, battlefront intel that the MSM never reports...all this stuff rolls in to the NSA and a whole mess of acronym-agencies who chew on it and digest it. And most of it never comes out to the rest of us, no matter how well-informed. Maybe thirty years from now when the next generation of satellites is aloft, we'll get some inkling released of what we could see and do.

Whether or not we're doing the right things with this stuff and using it to connect the right dots is a question far above my pay grade, and one I don't think Dean or I is well-informed enough to make confidently. We've seen some pretty serious intelligence failures, and we've seen what looks like some egregious politicization of the process, but we also aren't hearing about the successes. (There are a few, you know?) We only see a tiny slice of the data we'd need to reach that evaluation.

Thus, although we might be able to reach a reasonably informed judgment on the character of some of the more public personalities involved in the spy trade, and we might be able to discuss their handling of a particular issue that does get some focus (eg Plamegate), Dean and I can't really even estimate whether the CIA is doing a good job. We can only...guess.

* Example: you can estimate how much a trip to Disneyland will cost if you know some stuff: price of tickets, hotels, Mickey-mouse slave-labor-made stuffed animals, dinner, prozac, earplugs, pepto-bismol, airlines, etc. The better your information the better an estimate you can come up with.

You can guess how many unfunny wild-eyed slams at the Bush administration Keith Olbermann will deliver in an evening, but there's really no telling. He may do one, he may do thirty. If he did eleven last night, he may back off tonight and wail on Fox News for a change, or go whole-hog and do nothing but Bush-bashing for thirty minutes.