Michael Ledeen, so you know it's good...
...The commission's recommendations do not address this central issue, because the only real "fix" is beyond bureaucratic stratagem: It is good leadership, and with it, the ruthless imposition of accountability on policy makers, legislators, and intelligence officials. The call for a new intelligence overseer in the executive branch is downright silly. Any CEO of a distressed firm who retained failed managers and simply added new personnel and new organizational boxes would face open rebellion from his board and shareholders. Yet that is what the commission wants to do. Its recommendations finesse or exacerbate the real problems.
Without doubt, our two greatest failures are political, not structural. The first is relentless congressional tinkering with the CIA and FBI, reaching outright caricature on the eve of 9/11 — when the FBI could not even clip newspaper articles about advocates of jihad in America, and the CIA needed special permission to contact foreign officials whose human rights violations wouldn't pass muster at the ACLU. The second is American presidents, secretaries of state, and national-security advisers who cringed from ordering the difficult and risky enterprises needed to dismantle the terror network and threaten the regimes that supported it. The long years of piously drafted guidelines that hobbled our intelligence and law-enforcement services, combined with risk-avoidance at the highest levels, inevitably created the culture of today's intelligence community: Not a single human agent in Iraq from 1998 on, and no high-level penetration of the leading terrorist organizations. The commission has nothing to say about such matters, and calls for a super-committee in Congress with lifetime tenure for its members. This is a guarantee of failure; the members of such a committee would become de facto officials of the intelligence community instead of independent analysts.
If we really want to improve intelligence, then we should fire the failures, get individuals to take responsibility for analyses, and reward independent thinking. As things stand, "groupthink" is built into the system, not one senior official has been removed, and the commission's plan will make things worse.
#1
IF anything, this is where I fault Bush in his response to 9/11 - this quote sums it up quite nicely:
If we really want to improve intelligence, then we should fire the failures, get individuals to take responsibility for analyses, and reward independent thinking. As things stand, "groupthink" is built into the system, not one senior official has been removed, and the commission's plan will make things worse.
#2
As things stand, "groupthink" is built into the system, not one senior official has been removed,..
If this is the "compassionate" part of compassionate conservatism, then this is something we can do without. I could have lived with more of the conservatism and less of the compassion as it has been applied, but instead, we seemed to have gotten the reverse.
#3
I have to agree that GWâs most significant flaw is his refusal to fire the incompetents. Iâm still voting Kerry though, as itâs less of a flaw than an eager willingness to hire the incompetents.
Posted by: B ||
08/11/2004 10:30 Comments ||
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#4
Oopsâ¦voting for Bush...
Posted by: B ||
08/11/2004 10:32 Comments ||
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#5
Bar is right groupthink or consensus is how âfinishedâ intelligence gets finished. Few analysts will stick their neck out on a hunch or try to extrapolate Intel to support a theory. Having worked in this culture I can tell you that it frowned upon and no career manager would allow a report to go past his desk that wasnât supported by one or more other sources.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
