An Evaluation of the Intelligence Reform Bill
American Future Blog
Earlier today, Dave Schuler of The Glittering Eye posted a highly critical commentary on the Intelligence Reform Bill, claiming that its passage won't make us more secure. His conclusion is that the provisions of the Bill may make it easier to identify the perpetrators of future terrorist attacks, but won't reduce the likelihood of their occurence.
If the Bill is to make us safer, it must improve the quality of the information and judgments supplied to the president and other key policymakers. The distinction between informationm and judgments is critical.
I suspect that the quality of information will improve:
It will be easier to connect the dots. In addition to creating an office of intelligence director to oversee America's 14 intelligence agencies, the Bill mandates that information be shared among them. Information sharing will be facilitated by a computer network that will allow counterterrorism investigators to instantly query a massive system of interconnected commerical and government databases.
Federal wiretapping power is expanded. For non-citizens, it eliminates the requirement that the target be connected to a foreign country. Considering the transnational character of Islamofascism, this change is well-advised.
The Bill includes automatic pretrial detention for terrorism suspects, even when it can't be shown, as current law requires, that a suspect endangers the public or is a flight risk.
An amendment to the "material support" statute that further criminalizes association with foreign terrorist organizations is part of the Bill. For the first time, involvement in the planning or execution of a terrorist act isn't required for a federal crime to have been committed. Membership in a government-designated terrorist organization suffices.
Whether the quality of intelligence will improve is problematical. Today's Washington Post editorial raises several important questions:
Will a national intelligence director without day-to-day authority over operations and agents in the field be as capable as a CIA director of making judgments about intelligence and operational priorities?
What will be the practical relationship among the three senior intelligence officials who now will be nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate, including the director of the counterterrorism center as well as the CIA and national intelligence directors?
Which one can best brief the president?
Will this massive wartime reorganization help or hinder the critical task of bolstering the CIA's operations on the ground in difficult and dangerous places such as Iraq and Iran?
Will the reforms diminish or increase the likelihood that future intelligence judgments will fall victim to "groupthink," or political influence by a presidential appointee?
If the quality of the new intelligence organization's judgments is no better than that of the old one, the hypothesized improvement in information quality will have little or no effect. While I'm skeptical that the Intelligence Reform Bill will make us safer, I'm not yet willing to rule it out.
Posted by Marc Schulman americanfuture.typepad.com |
