What the Times doesn’t mention is that people have been highlighting that need for decades and little seems to have changed. An even more thorough account of CIA profiling, which Carey cites, appeared in Foreign Policy in 1994. The 6,100-word article, by Thomas Omestad, is a fascinating read (unavailable online, unfortunately), which goes into exquisite detail on the history of profiling from afar, as well as Post’s and journalists’ preeminent roles therein:
It was Post’s portrait of Saddam Hussein during the Persian Gulf crisis that focused public attention on psychological profiling as never before,” Omestad reported. Not since Hitler had the mentality of a leader so seized the American imagination and seemed so threatening. Hussein was the Evil Dictator from Central Casting. The media’s appetite for material on Hussein was intense, and Post was all over the airwaves and op-ed pages to sate it. He presented his portrait of Hussein in congressional testimony that subsequently encouraged some lawmakers to authorize the Bush administration’s use of force against Iraq.
Post is at it again, this time with Foreign Policy’s help. The outlet ran a commentary from him on March 15 that assessed Libya’s “mercurial leader” and argued “Qaddafi is indeed prepared to go down in flames.” About a year before that, in May 2010, it ran a piece headlined “Profiles in Phobia—The irrational fears that keep the world’s most powerful leaders up at night,” which also looked at Qaddafi, among four others. Unfortunately, neither of these pieces exhibited the context or skepticism of Omestad’s article from 1994, which laid bare numerous problems related to profiling. It even quoted our current secretary of defense, then recently retired from the CIA, reporting that:
Outside a small circle of practitioners, the methods of profiling are dimly understood. Even former and current officials who praise particular profiles tend to be deeply skeptical about the field. Typical is the comment of Robert Gates, a former CIA director and deputy national security adviser: “Trying to diagnose somebody for 5,000 mile away who you’ve never seen does not fill me with confidence.”
Later, the article expands on this criticism, pointing out that, “The pitfalls of psychological inference aside, the CIA profiling suffers from a more prosaic, but serious problem: factual errors … The CIA would stumble over such basic facts as where a president or minister was educated, whether he was married, and how many children he had.” Omestad actually deems these errors to be profiling’s “biggest flaw,” and concludes with some suggestions about how the technique could be improved:
The CIA needs to renews a rigorous effort to check facts, principally through open sources. More consistent and intensive review of profiles by regional specialists and psychologists outside the agency - and when possible by people who have known the subjects - would root out some mistakes and help deter the CIA from hewing to a rigid institutional view of certain leaders…
The profilers should take care to distinguish conjecture from fact—a kind of truth-in-labeling practice. Those warning labels might remind readers that a profile is but one analytical tool among others. They might also caution that explaining a leader in purely rational terms inevitably overlooks the unknowable influences of irrationality, chance, and even serendipity on how that leader will really act. Policymakers, for their part, should stop pushing the CIA to make bold predictions about foreign leaders when the necessary data is simply unavailable.
It’s spot-on advice for journalists as well, and reporters should look up Omestad’s article before embarking on any stories about profiling or the mental state of dictators. They should also bear in mind the “Goldwater rule” when attempting to cover the antics of alleged madmen—whether they be murderers, celebrities, or anybody that has not undergone a formal psychiatric evaluation.
Given that psychiatrists who have examined individuals are generally bound by medical confidentiality, strict adherence to the Goldwater rule would basically mean that there could be no journalistic discussion of the impact of mental health on public life. One could argue that it's worth getting rid of the baby to dispose of what is admittedly an awful lot of bathwater.
#1 Posted by Jim Naureckas, CJR on Wed 30 Mar 2011 at 03:18 PM
Great point, Jim, thanks. Psychiatrists certainly have to abide by HIPAA privacy rules. My feeling is that the APA's "Goldwater rule" should stand, especially given that law, and that journalists should disallow sources from making specific diagnoses. Instead, they can ask their sources to discuss symptoms and other general characteristics of mental disorders. And when they do that in relation to a story about Qaddafi, for example, they must include qualifiers explaining that those sources have not actually examined Qaddafi, that commentary is based such-and-such direct or indirect information, and that such evaluations come with caveats galore (they could even mention HIPAA).
#2 Posted by Curtis Brainard, CJR on Wed 30 Mar 2011 at 03:48 PM
It's okay to imply that someone is mentally unstable, so long as that someone is not — or, is no longer — part of the American Warfare State.
Possibly unstable: Gaddafi, Sheen, Alex Jones, Ron Paul, Julian Assange, Wikileaks.
Never unstable: Obama, Bernanke, Israel, the NYT, the AP.
Btw, war is peace.
#3 Posted by Dan A., CJR on Wed 30 Mar 2011 at 06:47 PM
Right Dan A. is. The double standard is really what the Goldwater Rule is all about. Read Teddy White on Goldwater. He was able at least to talk about Goldwater's supporters, the bland fact that lots of them were bonkers. Richard Hofstadter had some pretty trenchant things to say about paranoia as a political force.
But Goldwater wins a libel suit and, next thing you know, we get Nixon, then Reagan. . . and here we are.
If mental health professionals are not allowed to call an obviously crazy person crazy, who is going to do it?
#4 Posted by edward ericson jr., CJR on Thu 31 Mar 2011 at 04:40 PM
The Washington Post's David Ignatius wrote an interesting blog post on February 22 after the televised speech in which Qaddafi denied the existence of protestors in Libya.
"Watching Moammar Gaddafi's televised rant today -- in which he threatened, in effect, to turn himself into a suicide bomb and take his country down with him -- a reasonable person would conclude that the Libyan leader is a dangerous nut," he wrote.
Ignatius immediately justified that assertion by adding, "I can offer a shred of personal experience to support this view of the Libyan leader as an unstable and menacing person." He then went on to describe a trip he made to Tripoli in the 1980s with some other journalists to interview Qaddafi.
The reporters were taken to a "large hall" to await the dictator who eventually marched in, stopped about a foot from Ignatius's face, stared at him with "bulging, bloodshot eyes ... shouted something in Arabic to his aides and bolted from the room, never to return."
Ignatius called it "one of the oddest encounters I've had as a journalist."
#5 Posted by Curtis Brainard, CJR on Thu 31 Mar 2011 at 04:56 PM