Professor warns students of possible ethical dilemmas

Janne Nolan was surprised by the number of people that gathered to hear her speak on Thursday…. Janne Nolan was surprised by the number of people that gathered to hear her speak on Thursday.

Her speech, “The Ethics of Dissent,” was the first in a series of lectures about politics and accountability cosponsored by the School of Information Sciences and the Johnson Institute for Responsible Leadership in Pitt’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs.

“Ethics isn’t usually a huge draw,” Nolan said.

Nevertheless, more than 15 extra chairs had to be brought up to the Patrician Room in the Pitt Athletic Association building to accommodate the higher-than-expected number of people who attended the speech.

Nolan, a professor of international affairs at Pitt, began by explaining the importance of ethics for students looking for jobs in public service, especially government jobs that involved classified or sensitive work.

“The temptations of Washington are not for the fainthearted,” Nolan said.

Nolan also said that a key dilemma in politics today is how to distinguish between disloyalty and legitimate dissent.

Nolan pointed to the ethical questions apparent in today’s news: leaks of classified information, questions about Abu Ghraib and the effectiveness of the Geneva Conventions as a counter-terrorism instrument.

Nolan said that many events that had been described as “strategic surprises” or “intelligence failures,” from the start of the Soviet atomic bomb to the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, have instead been failures of decision makers who refuse to acknowledge new, evolving ideas.

Nolan cited three cases known as intelligence failures that actually came from distortions in policy: the fall of the Shah of Iran in 1979, the failure to protect against the Al Qaeda bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa in 1998 and the lack of discussion after the United States decided to withdraw from Afghanistan in 1991.

Nolan said that officials had more than enough evidence that the Shah of Iran would fall, but they marginalized the people who mentioned the problems in Iran.

“It didn’t take a rocket scientist to see there were problems in that society,” Nolan said.

Nolan pointed out similarities in the events that happened in east Africa and Afghanistan: officials did not want to believe terrorism existed in East Africa or that arming Afghanis could become harmful to the United States.

“Policymakers gave hardly any thought to what arming, training and supporting rival factions of religiously conservative or even extremist groups within Afghanistan would do to that country itself, much less how it might affect U.S. interests,” Nolan said.

Nolan said she feels America should engage more on the local and regional levels of countries instead of dealing with despots and ignoring the local population.

“It seems like the learning curve is much too steep,” Nolan added.

At the end of her speech, Nolan posed the rhetorical question: What happens when analysts, experts and whole agencies become reluctant to share expertise and withhold information?