ABSTRACT
Today’s western derivates of the world’s second oldest profession1 share the paradoxical task of operating in secret in order to defend an open society. Recent intelligence scandals have illustrated that democracies are not immune from the politicization of intelligence services by members of the executive or from illegal practices by members of the intelligence services. One can point to the British and US governments’ selective usage of intelligence assessments in the months before the Iraq war in 2003. The infamous “dodgy dossier” springs to mind, a UK government publication that inserted plagiarized excerpts from an academic source in an attempt to make the case for an imminent threat to international peace and security posed by Baghdad. The British intelligence community, the UK government claimed on numerous occasions, had fully endorsed the estimation that “Iraqi military are able to deploy chemical and biological weapons within 45 minutes of an order to do so”.2 In a similar fashion, Colin Powell, former US Secretary of State, addressed the UN Security Council in March 2003 by saying: “[T]hese are not assertions. What we are giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence”. It was noted that, “at the very least, the case for the continued and threatening existence of WMD in Iraq was presented at a level of certainty quite unheard of in intelligence assessment”.3
