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. |