What's wrong with our intelligence? Why can't we get it together? It can't be funding. What is it? I hear both the left and the right criticizing our intelligence as non-existent...and blaming it for N. Korea right now and failures in Iraq? How can this be? So what...what...do we need to do here? No one gives solutions. Is this a real problem? How can this still be a problem? I never read about what anyone is going to do about it. How could this not be one area both sides would jump at to take credit for fixing?
2 comments:
The Clinton administration gutted our intelligence services and built "walls" between them so that even if they wanted to cooperate, it was illegal for them to share information.
Also, we have the best electronic intelligence gathering in the world, but come up woefully short when it comes to human intelligence. It's almost impossible to plant agents inside terrorist organizatons because they're made up of relatives or lifelong friends. They don't trust outsiders with their secrets.
The job is made more difficult because the terrorists don't have rational goals. Their object is just to kill. So, their attacks could occur anywhere at any time.
Discounting survival, it is in a national politicians' best interest to have ineffective or even dysfunctional intelligence agencies. Intelligence is all about gathering facts and predicting the outcome of particular scenario, the better the facts the better the prediction. What politician wants to be constrained by facts?
Now, back to the discounting of survival. Our country will not be lost by any single or even a handful of destructive events. The chain of causality will consist of many, many events. Relative to our enemies, our country's size and strength is vast. The politicians (and entities like the New York Times) feel free to ignore their part in the chain of causality because they view their contribution as insignificant. Or said another way, they do not think they will be responsible and therefore will not be held accountable.
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