Khashoggi murder tape unpacked

What makes Jamal Khashoggi’s murder particularly chilling is that it was reportedly recorded on audio tape. By US President Donald Trump’s account, it reveals ‘a very violent, very vicious, and very terrible’ incident and he doesn’t want to hear it. His national-security adviser, John Bolton, echoed that last week, raising tensions at a press briefing where journalists pressed him on why he wouldn’t want to hear the raw intelligence about one of the major national-security issues confronting the US. The Atlantic reports that this stance underscores an important point about what the intelligence community does: It takes raw pieces of information such as the Khashoggi tape and interprets them for policy makers, through context and analysis. ‘Raw intelligence in the hands of policy makers is always a risky proposition,’ said intelligence expert Amy Zegart. ‘Raw intel typically does not include assessments about the credibility of a source. It does not include context like what happened just before the recording started? Was the person whose comms were intercepted being coerced? Were there more forces at play? Was the recording genuine? What exactly was said? What accents and words were involved, and what do they tell us about who was in the room, where they came from, and what their relationships with each other are?’ The report notes that this is why the hunt within the George W. Bush-era Defence Department for raw intelligence that could bolster the case for war in Iraq was so controversial. Some reports, absent good analysis about their credibility, ended up painting a misleading picture.

Full analysis in The Atlantic