Paul pillar bio

Profile Paul Pillar. Bio and Featured Works. Component Professor Pillar retired in from a year career in the U. Earlier he served in a variety of analytical and managerial positions, including as chief of analytic units at the CIA covering portions of the Near East, the Persian Gulf, and South Asia. Professor Pillar also served in the National Intelligence Council as one of the original members of its Analytic Group.

Professor Pillar is a retired officer in the U. Army Reserve and served on active duty in , including a tour of duty in Vietnam. Optional Featured Work Title. Optional Featured Work Display Order. Cancel Save. Are you sure you'd like to delete your existing Featured Work? Cancel Delete. But someone there told Novak about it. So Novak, apparently feeling bound by no rules, outed Pillar by identifying him as the speaker.

It's a trick he uses often—others attend off-the-record meetings or briefings, tell him about it, and he reports not just what was said, but fingers those who spoke as well. Roberts II described Pillar is "a longstanding intellectual opponent of the policy options chosen by President Bush to fight terrorism". Roberts questioned Pillar's suitability to lead the writing of the NIE on Iraq, accusing him of disclosing, to academics and other nongovernmental personnel with whom the National Intelligence Council speaks, the advice given to President Bush.

Another critic of Pillar's speaking against Administration policy, focused around the dinner speech cited by Novak, suggested that CIA management, as a whole, might have been politicized against the Bush Administration. Hayes of the Weekly Standard questions why "A senior, unelected CIA official—Paul Pillar—was given agency approval to anonymously attack Bush administration policies less than two months before the November 2, presidential election His was not an isolated case; CIA officials routinely trashed Bush administration policy decisions, often with official approval, in the months leading up to the Iraq War and again before the election".

Army War College , and was held February 25—26, Conference participants included representatives from government agencies involved in the U. War: Competing Approaches to Fighting Terrorism. In early , he wrote an article for Foreign Affairs criticizing the Bush Administration for cherry picking intelligence to justify the invasion of Iraq.

Pillar wrote that the Administration went to war in Iraq "without requesting—and evidently without being influenced by—any strategic-level intelligence assessments on any aspect of Iraq. It has become clear that official intelligence was not relied on in making even the most significant national security decisions, that intelligence was misused publicly to justify decisions already made, that damaging ill will developed between [Bush] policymakers and intelligence officers, and that the intelligence community's own work was politicized".

Scott Ritter , writing on his blog in February , agreed with Pillar's assessment of politicization, but suggested that Pillar had mixed motives in limiting "his criticism to the Bush administration during the time period leading up to the invasion in March ". Ritter criticizes Pillar for not mentioning "the issue of regime change and the role played by the CIA in carrying out covert action at the instruction of the White House both Democratic and Republican to remove Saddam Hussein from power.

Pillar continues to promulgate the myth that the CIA was honestly engaged in the business of trying to disarm Iraq". Clarke " and noted that this article was "the first time that such a senior intelligence officer has so directly and publicly condemned the administration's handling of intelligence". In an interview with the Council on Foreign Relations , he elaborated on the politicization of intelligence on which he wrote in the Foreign Affairs article.

And you have to remember, anything that sees light of day as a published—published in the sense of a classified paper—intelligence assessment goes through usually multiple levels of review, various supervisors, branch chiefs and so on, weighing in, approving or disapproving, remanding, forcing changes. That can be a speedy process or it can be a long, very torturous process".

He said the Commission found that assessments that tended to justify a casus belli with Iraq went through approval faster than those that did not support war. Pillar agreed, but said the Commission also should have asked why this occurred. According to Pillar, "I think the most important reason, besides the overall mind-set that turned out to be erroneous, was the desire to avoid the unpleasantness of putting unwelcome assessments on the desks of policymakers".

In , Novak decried Pillar's alleged leaking to the media of portions of a National Intelligence Estimate he viewed as supporting his policy path, though he acknowledged that Pillar denied leaking the report. When the administration did finally ask for an intelligence assessment, Mr. Pillar led the effort, which concluded in August that Iraq was on the brink of disaster.

The idea was that Mr. Pillar was not to be trusted because he dissented from the party line. Somehow, this sounds like a story we have heard before. A Wall Street Journal op-ed criticized Pillar's choices in releasing information. I've begun to wonder if part of that program now includes a writing seminar on how to beat up on the Bush administration.

Regarding the Foreign Affairs article, Christensen questions if that was the place to publicize that he thought the war was a bad idea and the President and advisors ignored him. He makes the assumption that But Pillar "actually did change his mind about all that work he'd done, and that he really did think the intelligence didn't support the case for war.

If that was truly so, no one was better positioned to make the case against war within the government than Mr. Pillar himself". Christensen suggested that Pillar could have sent personal observations, with all relevant classified data, to senior Executive Branch officials. Further, Christensen suggested "that analysis with every single member of Congress by writing less-classified summaries of the conclusions, as is often done".

Thomas Joscelyn , in the Weekly Standard , wrote, "Pillar demonstrates that he himself is a master of the art of politicizing intelligence. Far from being a dispassionate analyst, Pillar practices the very same 'manipulations and misuse[s]' he claims to expose". Joscelyn reasserted the conjecture that Saddam Hussein had a cooperative relationship with al-Qaeda.

Pillar's interest in foreign policy resulted in a book Terrorism and U. Foreign Policy first published in and updated in The back cover of the book reads:. Terrorism and U. Foreign Policy is an essential guide to more effective coordination between conventional foreign policy and efforts to prevent terrorist attacks and activities. A review of the book in Foreign Affairs says: "The book's strength is its nuanced sense of how Washington's counterterrorism policy actually works, day in and day out.

The Washington Times wrote: "[Pillar] offers a unique introspective of the breadth of radical islam and counterterrorism. Pillar's documentations involving the improvement of U. Homeland Security policy, such as observing the full range of capabilities of terrorist, as opposed to solely focusing on nuclear, biological or chemical warfare, and interrupting radical islamist operations worldwide, should be noted in the counterterrorism effort.

Pillar's interest in the relationship between intelligence and policy resulted in the book, Intelligence and U. Foreign Policy. According to the publisher, "Pillar confronts the intelligence myths Americans have come to rely on to explain national tragedies, including the belief that intelligence drives major national security decisions and can be fixed to avoid future failures".

Pillar emphasized that jihadist terror will continue to become more decentralized, but not wane, after the core of al-Qaeda is disrupted and pursued.

Paul pillar bio

Al Qaeda-inspired or trained groups will operate locally, and both ad hoc groups e. Even while having local focus, they tend to share anti-Americanism. Individuals may operate with limited help from organizations. In the past, ad hoc had been deprecated as a term for terrorist organizations, but that grows increasingly true. See motivations of terrorists and a discussion of the nontraditional clandestine cell system used by such groups.

Participating in a conference at the Royal Institute of International Relations , he analyzed and assessed the threat of jihadist terrorism on a worldwide basis. Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Read Edit View history. Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects. Wikimedia Commons Wikidata item. This article has multiple issues.

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