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To: The Philosopher who wrote (6634)	2/5/2004 2:36:02 PM
From: The Philosopher	Respond to of 20773

The speech by Tenet that I referred to in my earlier post is worth reading. Here's the cite again. story.news.yahoo.com One point he makes, that I think we tend to forget, is that for decades nearly all our intelligence efforts were concentrated on Cold War issue. Our spies, listening posts, electronic intercept capabilities, satellite photography, languge training, etc. were almost entirely focussed on Russia and Russian allies. When Russia collapsed, these agencies lost their primary focus. They were no longer considered that essential. They lost funding and, perhaps more important, status as important places for our most talented people to spend their careers. A great deal of our intelligence capability became irrelevant; much of it was simply dismantled. It takes time to turn a large government agency. The new focus on terrorism and on terrorism supporting states is taking time to implement. We need a whole new set of languge experts and translators, and our universities have been turning out relatively few graduates with these language skills. We need to develop a whole new set of on the ground souces. We need to place a whole new set of moles who often take a decade or more to be really productive. The task is enormous. If we aren't yet as perfect at it as we would like to be, that frankly doesn't surprise me.