"Intelligence reform" is, as they used to say of the Moral Majority, neither. The intelligence-reform bill that has at least temporarily been scuttled on Capitol Hill despite its endorsement by all the great and good of Washington from Democratic congressional leaders to President Bush is neither intelligent nor is it real reform. It is a meaningless, and perhaps even counterproductive, bureaucratic reshuffling that has garnered such across-the-board praise exactly because it is such an empty gesture.
The idea behind the reform bill pushed primarily by the 9/11 Commission is that what ails U.S. intelligence can be fixed by the creation of a national intelligence director, centralizing vast powers over the intelligence community's budgets, policies and procedures. This is supposedly a bureaucratic magic bullet. Of course, if the bill passes and if God forbid there's another major terror attack a few years hence, the complaint will immediately go up that U.S. intelligence is "too centralized."
The fact is that measures to make us safer usually aren't uncontroversial for instance, taking the fight to the enemy overseas as aggressively as possible, or offending the civil-liberties lobby by implementing the Patriot Act. Since many Democrats don't endorse these steps (in fact, routinely howl about them), they are always looking to get onboard window-dressing tough-on-terror measures, which is what makes the intelligence-reform bill a perfect cause for them. |