“Groupthink has become as American as apple pie and prisoner abuse.”

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The New York Times

Their faces long with disapproval, the anchors announced that the reason for the war had finally been uncovered by the Senate Intelligence Committee, and it was “groupthink,” not to mention “collective groupthink.” It sounds so kinky and un-American, like something that might go on in a North Korean stadium or in one of those sex clubs that Jack Ryan, the former Illinois Senate candidate, is accused of dragging his wife to. But supposedly intelligent, morally upstanding people had been indulging in it right in Langley, Va.

This is a surprise? Groupthink has become as American as apple pie and prisoner abuse; in fact, it’s hard to find any thinking these days that doesn’t qualify for the prefix “group.” Our standardized-test-driven schools reward the right answer, not the unsettling question. Our corporate culture prides itself on individualism, but it’s the “team player” with the fixed smile who gets to be employee of the month. In our political culture, the most crushing rebuke is to call someone “out of step with the American people.” Zip your lips, is the universal message, and get with the program.

This summer’s remake of the “Stepford Wives” doesn’t have anything coherent to say about gender politics: Men are the oppressors? Women are the oppressors? Or maybe just Glenn Close? But it does play to the fantasy, more widespread than I’d realized, that if you were to rip off the face of the person sitting in the next cubicle, you’d find nothing but circuit boards underneath.

I trace the current outbreak of droid like conformity to the immediate aftermath of 9/11, when groupthink became the official substitute for patriotism, and we began to run out of surfaces for affixing American flags. Bill Maher lost his job for pointing out that, whatever else they were, the 9/11 terrorists weren’t cowards, prompting Ari Fleischer to warn (though he has since backed down) that Americans “need to watch what they say.” Never mind that Sun Tzu says, somewhere in his oeuvre, that while it’s soothing to underestimate the enemy, it’s often fatal, too.

And what was that group thinking in Abu Ghraib? Yes, the accused guards seem to have been encouraged to soften up their charges for interrogation, just as the operatives at Langley were pelted with White House demands for some plausible casus belli. But the alarming thing is how few soldiers demurred, and how many got caught up in the fun of it.

Societies throughout history have recognized the hazards of groupthink and made arrangements to guard against it. The shaman, the wise woman and similar figures all represent institutionalized outlets for alternative points of view. In the European carnival tradition, a “king of fools” was permitted to mock the authorities, at least for a day or two. In some cultures, people resorted to vision quests or hallucinogens åE¹ anything to get out of the box. Because, while the capacity for groupthink is an endearing part of our legacy as social animals, it’s also a common precondition for self-destruction. One thousand coalition soldiers have died because the C.I.A. was so eager to go along with the emperor’s delusion that he was actually wearing clothes.

Instead of honoring groupthink resisters, we subject them to insult and abuse. Sgt. Samuel Provance III has been shunned by fellow soldiers since speaking out against the torture at Abu Ghraib, in addition to losing his security clearance and being faced with a possible court-martial. A fellow Abu Ghraib whistle-blower, Specialist Joseph Darby, was praised by the brass, but has had to move to an undisclosed location to avoid grass-roots retaliation.

The list goes on. Sibel Edmonds lost her job at the F.B.I. for complaining about mistranslations of terror-related documents from the Arabic. Jesselyn Radack was driven out of her post at the Justice Department for objecting to the treatment of John Walker Lindh, then harassed by John Ashcroft’s enforcers at her next job. As Fred Alford, a political scientist who studies the fate of whistle-blowers, puts it: “We need to understand in this `land of the free and home of the brave’ that most people are scared to death. About 50 percent of all whistle-blowers lose their jobs, about half of those lose their homes, and half of those people lose their families.”

This nation was not founded by habitual group thinkers. But it stands a fair chance of being destroyed by them.

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Go to Original

Believing Your Own Propaganda: Groupthink on Iraq and the Bay of Pigs By Max Castro Progreso Weekly

July 15-21 Issue

It’s official: Bush took the nation to war on the basis of untruths.

The scathing, unanimous findings of the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee leave no room for the administration’s usual spinning and dissembling. Reacting to the committee’s stinging criticism of the agency, John McLaughlin, the CIA’s deputy director said: “We got it.” The media got it too. In the words of the Seattle Times:

The report, endorsed by all nine Republicans and eight Democrats on the committee, found that the primary reason President Bush gave for attacking Iraq was untrue. The intelligence committee concluded that the repeated, authoritative assertions by the President and other top U.S. officials were false: There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and no Saddam Hussein involvement with Al Qaeda terrorism or with 9/11. Further, the conclusion that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was not reasonable and was not supported by the evidence, the committee found.

All this has been evident for a long time, but the Senate report carries a special weight and confers a sense of finality. It’s the last nail in the coffin of the administration’s case for war. It may even persuade a portion of that 40 percent of Americans that, according to the polls, still believe in a Saddam Hussein-9/11 connection.

How did they get it so wrong? In this report the committee, controlled by Republicans, focused exclusively on intelligence failures, conveniently setting aside the issue of the actions of high administration officials for a second report after the elections. That means we are only getting half the story or less. But this portion is devastating in and of itself.

What accounts for the gigantic failure of U.S intelligence regarding Iraq? The Committee’s explanation is that intelligence analysts and officials in the CIA engaged in Groupthink. They shared a belief that Iraq had hidden stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and was secretly developing nuclear weapons. This conviction shaped how analysts viewed data that was often contradictory and uncertain: evidence that could support the shared belief was seized upon while evidence that contradicted it was ignored or rejected. Under these circumstances, any doubts that may have cropped up in the minds of individual analysts were not raised or were dismissed by peers or superiors. The result of this selective perception was to transform a very weak case based on doubtful sources and dated information into a case presumed to be strong enough for U.S. policymakers to use in order to persuade the country and the world that war was justified.

But why did the members of the intelligence community engage in Groupthink? Was Groupthink limited to CIA analysts or did it infect the thought processes and decision making of top officials as well?

The social psychologist Irving Janis appears to have coined the word Groupthink, which he defined as:

A mode of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive group, when the members’ strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action.

In American history, the paradigm of Groupthink leading to disastrous decisions and awful results, the textbook case studied by Janis and others, is the Bay of Pigs invasion. Does the classic case of Groupthink throw any light on what happened in the run-up to the Iraq war?

A common factor that may have affected the decision-making processes on Iraq and the Bay of Pigs is that both cases involved invasions undertaken against the principles of international law. Such illegitimacy required much deception and duplicity. In the case of the Bay of Pigs, the United States sought to deny its involvement and the President failed to inform the U.S. ambassador to the UN Adlai Stevenson, who proceeded to make a fool of himself before the world body. In the Iraq case, Woodward’s account makes clear that Powell learns of the decision to go to war after the fact, and that the diplomatic route was largely a smoke screen behind which military preparations went on for many months. Under these circumstances, the line between illusion and fact, reality and wishful thinking blur, and some actors in the drama may end up believing their own propaganda åE” or the propaganda of other self-interested players, such as exiles eager for U.S. intervention.

In the case of the Bay of Pigs, it is clear that Groupthink was not confined to intelligence and military personnel but extended far up the chain of command. For example, top Kennedy advisor Arthur Schlesinger had grave doubts about the invasion but failed to voice them in meetings. The reason may be that when Schlesinger did express his objections in a memo, Attorney General Robert Kennedy admonished him for not standing behind the President. When Kennedy called for a vote on the invasion at a meeting with top aides, he asked everyone’s opinion except Schlesinger’s. Schlesinger later lamented his silence, blaming “the circumstances of the discussion” for his timidity. What is clear is that the President himself, as well as the Attorney General, played a critical role in creating the climate that made it impossible for even a senior advisor to dissent.

In the Iraq case, the accounts of former administration insiders, including counter-terrorism czar Richard Clarke and Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, have shown that Bush had a predisposition to wage war on Iraq that even predated 9/11. After the terrorist attacks, the President pressured Clarke to find evidence to implicate Saddam. Thus Bush set the tone. As in the Bay of Pigs, most other top advisors voiced opinions similar to the President’s and those with doubts were timid. When they did speak, hard-line colleagues sometimes slammed them.

In 2002-2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell starred in the Schlesinger role. Powell struggled to avert war by making diplomacy work and by warning Bush about the costs of invading: “If you break it, you own,” he told the President according to Bob Woodward. But Bush, like Kennedy with Schlesinger, avoided asking Powell for his opinion, according to Bob Woodward. In the end, however, Powell not only saluted and went along, he appeared before the UN to make a case he knew was less solid than he made it out to be. He did not convince the world body but Powell’s presentation, bolstered by his reputation for integrity and moderation, convinced opinion leaders and many ordinary people in the United States, which is what Bush really was after. Schlesinger can be blamed for being faint-hearted in not opposing the Bay of Pigs invasion forcefully, but Powell ended up as a Great Enabler (second only to Tony Blair) of the Iraq invasion.

If Groupthink in favor of war in Iraq, emanating from the very top and policed by such administration attack dogs as Vice President Dick Cheney, affected the actions and thought processes of someone as senior and seasoned as Powell, who could expect analysts in Langley to maintain their objectivity?

Indeed, a case can be made that the process of Groupthink flowing from the top not only pervaded the ranks of the intelligence services but also reached down to the grassroots of American society. Why? Remember the definition of Groupthink?

A mode of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive group, when the members’ strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action. The trauma of 9/11 involved the entire American people in a “cohesive group” in which “strivings for unanimity” overwhelmed the capacity to “realistically appraise alternative courses of action.” The Bush administration got this and manipulated the American people’s vulnerability to succumb to Groupthink in this moment of crisis. It did so through a barrage of misinformation and fear-mongering, up to and including evoking the specter of a mushroom cloud. Congress was stampeded as part and parcel of the same process.

The administration would have gotten away with it too. Was there any blame or investigation after the successful CIA-sponsored overthrow of the democratic government of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954 (a model for the Bay of Pigs) despite its illegality and the decades of mass killings and dictatorships that followed it? The problem for Bush in Iraq, as for Kennedy in the Bay of Pigs, is that things did not go as planned. Ultimately, this administration, like Kennedy’s, fell prey to its own propaganda: the invaders were not received with flowers either on the beaches of Cuba or on the streets of Iraq.

But Kennedy wondered how he could have been so stupid and immediately took full blame for the failure, a gesture that may have saved him from paying a political price had he lived. Infallible in his own mind, Bush, in contrast, is in denial months after the facts about Iraq became obvious. Even after the damning Senate committee report last week, he is still stumbling around, proffering one after-the-fact rationalization after another åE” and dodging responsibility. But the spell has been broken, much of the Congress and most of the nation have recovered from Groupthink, and Bush will face a skeptical American public as he campaigns for reelection.