Counterterrorism Blog

Is counterterrorism more of an art than a science? That question may be irrelevant, since Americans take pride in practicing both effectively. We have plenty of world-class artists, as well as experts who tell us what art is meaningful and most likely to withstand the test of time, and why. We lead the world in government-sponsored scientific research. Few qualified scientists today have not been tempted to relocate to the U.S., for such a move would allow them to most effectively practice their trade. Whether counterterrorism is an art or a science, we have the means to practice it effectively, and to fully exploit the results.

The problem is that neither art nor pure science result in immediate economic rewards for their practitioners. To solve this problem, we rely on a combination of state sponsorship and philanthropic funders to ease the way for gifted individuals to remain in the game, and to keep them working at things that may ultimately be long-lasting and priceless. On occasion, this system of funding causes people to react with alarm, and to look askance at particular scientific or artistic results

Consider the revelation that a medical researcher whose study suggested that lung cancer might be diagnosed at an early stage through regular chest scans had been funded by an organization tied to tobacco companies. The national television news media had no trouble jumping on the story and waxing indignant about it, though their medical experts could not adequately answer the question of whether the science in this particular instance was sound. That would require them to read the study. There has not been much coverage after the initial deluge. Though I do not know for sure, my bet is that the study may be empirically sound even if the researchers erred in not disclosing the funding sources, which takes away the story. This may account for the relative silence.

Why is it this way? Why is not the soundness of the study itself the real issue, rather than who might have been funding the research? If regular CT scans can effectively catch early stages of lung cancer, should that finding be ignored merely because the researcher who established this fact received tobacco money? If so, are we not stressing financial purity to the detriment of human lives? Most people I have spoken to believe we should exploit the Nazi biomedical studies, notwithstanding that they were done in contravention of modern biomedical ethics.

So it is with art. Aficionados likes to say art is an end in itself. To many art critics, asking what an artist intended by a certain work is about as relevant as determining the gender of a newborn by asking the mother, What did you intend to have, a boy or a girl? The art should stand on its own. (This is why I collect classic Jesus Freak music, despite the fact that I am not religious. The songs of the late, great Larry Norman are amazing, even if I am not moved by the lyrics.) As Richard Dawkins so aptly put it in The God Delusion:

Even great artists have to earn a living, and they take commissions where they can be had. I have no reason to doubt that Raphael and Michelangelo were Christians - it was pretty much the only option in their time - but this fact is almost incidental. Its enormous wealth had made the Church the dominant patron of the arts. If history had worked out differently, and Michelangelo has been commissioned to paint a ceiling for a giant Museum of Science, might he have produced something at least as inspirational as the Sistine Chapel? How sad that we shall never hear Beethovens’s "Mesozoic Symphony," or Mozart’s opera "The Expanding Universe." And what a shame that we are deprived of Haydn’s "Evolutionary Oratoria" - but that does not enjoy us from enjoying his "Creation."

For empiricists, good science is a work of art. They know it when they see it. This makes the question of who funded the scientific research less relevant than whether the results qualify as sound. Clearly, we are better off knowing whether lung cancer can be diagnosed early than not knowing. If this study could only have been accomplished with the financial assistance of an industry with a bad history, why complain? Why try to sniff out a scandal?

However, it is important to hold this claim to an important assumption - that the results are empirically sound (or the art is good). If not, no amount of apologizing for the source of funding can save it. That is, to me, the real issue.

Of course, in hard science at least, disproving a hypothesis is a form of empiricism, since it is part of the inquiry about what is true. That means that even “evil” money from tobacco companies was put to good use, if it generated a study that was ultimately rejected because, say, the results could not be replicated. If that happens, we are still better off than had the money not been spent. We advance science when a study is false. That is the essence of deductive reasoning.

Occassionally, the rejection of a study also serves to muddy up the researchers personally, making it less likely for us to trust them in the future. This is fair game. Science came to reject the fantastical claim that cold fusion could be generated in a desk-top apparatus, as two scientists from the University of Utah famously claimed in 1988. This bit of bad science - which was apparently driven by intra-state rivalry with Brigham Young University - will be less likely to occur again. Martin Fleischman and Stanley Pons have not been heard from much since. If this is the fate of Dr. Claudia Henschkehe’s tobacco-funded CT scan study, it is still significant, though the researcher may find herself unpopular among her peers. If this happens, I hope it does not deter Big Tobacco from funding future science.

All of this might be taken for an attitude that we should not scrutinize the funding sources of those who purport to be the world’s opinion-makers. I am not saying that. Virtually my entire professional career has been devoted to the value of following the money. I am enthusiastic about Stanley Kurtz and National Review Online’s publication of gifts given by foreign governments to American universities, in part because this is a positive step towards studying how and whether large-scale philanthropic giving impacts American research on the Middle East, including studies on whether Islam is a threat to American national security. In fact, I plan to be heavily involved in this question, which fascinates me. By the same token, it is important that science and art be judged on their own terms, and not solely on the basis of which large source of funding has made it possible. Otherwise, we run the risk of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

There is another important assumption that probably bears repeating: for lasting art and science to be achieved, standards need to be enforced. The standards vary with the traditions of the field. Research scientists who have been trained well understand the perils of deviating from industry research standards, to the point where these standards are internalized. This would include fighting the temptation to pull punches and not go where the data leads them, for fear of offending their funding sources. When this mischief happens, or is attempted, the participants should be held up to the full level of ridicule, like they were in Utah in 1988.

Does it happen? There are many people who think that government-funded scientific research is the most clean, because there are no strings attached. This, unfortunately, overlooks human nature, as well as what is known from public revelations about the inner-workings of the government. Take the U.S. intelligence community, which depends on the generation of analysis. A young man named A.J. Rossmiller has just published a book, entitled Still Broken, recounting his brief career as an analyst with the Defense Intelligence Agency, which included a six-month stint in Iraq and excellent job evaluations (which he felt compelled to include as an appendix to the book, lest anyone think he was not cut out for the work). What Rossmiller describes is a group of political, careerists bosses in the Pentagon who insisted that he and his colleagues not generate such pessimistic estimates about various issues involving our work in Iraq, so much so that he could not take it anymore. It seems that even government-sponsorship of truth-seeking work is prone to being driven by results.

This is a tendency that needs to be fought, whether the enterprise is art or science, and whether it is being done by government actors or privately-funded academics. When it comes to the soft science, in which empiricism is less rigorous, robust dialogue about the methods and the results must be encouraged, and the practitioners held to task.

The views in this article are not necessarily those of the Department of Justice.