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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: GST who wrote (108244)	7/26/2003 9:40:33 PM
From: Dayuhan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Certainly the Israelis would have a vested interest in encouraging the Americans to remove Saddam. I don't really think they produced the forged documents, though it's not impossible. They would probably have done a better job. I do wonder how much of the intelligence supporting the idea that Saddam posed a major threat came from parties with vested interests in promoting that view, notably Israel and Iraqi exiles.

To: GST who wrote (108244)	7/27/2003 5:25:31 AM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Where From Here? _______________________ Lead Editorial The Washington Post Sunday, July 27, 2003 THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION responded to last week's release of the joint congressional inquiry's report on 9/11 intelligence failures with confident assertions that any problems have been taken care of. President Bush stated that "my administration has transformed our government to pursue terrorists and prevent terrorist attacks." And FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III said that while the bureau was still implementing changes recommended by the report, the commission's findings were already out of date: "While the report provides a snapshot of the FBI at September 11, 2001, the picture of the FBI today shows a changed organization." The choice of tense in these statements is significant: The government has already been "transformed," the FBI already "changed." It is true that the past two years have seen the biggest reorganization of American government in decades, and Mr. Mueller has made significant changes at the bureau. Yet the show of confidence that deficiencies identified in this report are already a thing of the past seems premature. While America is unquestionably better positioned today than before the attacks to confront terrorism, it is far from clear that American counterterrorism is today functioning optimally. In fact, the joint inquiry report only begs the question of what a serious appraisal of the intelligence community's progress would show. The congressional investigation focused chiefly on what happened before the attacks, far less on what has been done since. There is no doubt that 9/11 prompted legal changes, resource commitments, bureaucratic shifts and -- perhaps most important -- a universal realization that fighting terrorism had to be the central priority of those responsible for American security. Yet many things did not change. Most fundamentally, the structure of the American intelligence community remains very much the motley group of agencies -- collectively lacking strong centralized authority -- that it ever was. And many observers remain skeptical that the FBI has been reborn from its law enforcement past as a first-rate intelligence and counterterrorism organization. It's easy for the administration to declare that the information-sharing problems that have long plagued the intelligence world have been fixed and that, as Mr. Mueller put it, "the FBI and the CIA have become integrated at virtually every level of our operations." But Congress needs to satisfy itself that the current arrangements really are the best they can be. Nobody designing an intelligence structure from scratch to deal with America's contemporary problems would conceive of the one this country now has. Nobody thinking rationally, for example, would have placed fighting global terrorism alongside arresting pornographers among the responsibilities of a federal law enforcement agency, nor would anyone have given the head of the CIA oversight of an intelligence operation whose agencies were spread out over several different Cabinet departments. The intelligence world is a patchwork that developed over decades in response to changing needs, geopolitical shifts, civil liberties concerns, bureaucratic turf warfare and simple happenstance. It may be that the costs associated with changing its fundamental design -- costs in effectiveness, in civil liberties and in money -- exceed the benefits. But after 9/11, these are not determinations that should be made through inertia or bureaucratic commitment to maintaining a comfortable status quo. The costs of mediocrity are far too high. The next major study of 9/11 will come from the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, headed by former New Jersey governor Thomas H. Kean. The bipartisan commission would do a great service if it addressed not merely the factors that led to the attacks but the adequacy of the intelligence reform that has followed them. © 2003 The Washington Post Company washingtonpost.com