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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Amy J who wrote (190215)	6/10/2004 2:27:22 PM
From: Tenchusatsu	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1586721

Amy, He pumps it into military to fight a geographical war rather than pumping money into intelligence to fight a 21st century terrorist battle - why aren't their databases all synched up by now? Bush is funding military, not intelligence. I have heard these arguments repeated ad nauseum by Bush's opponents, especially Kerry, though not once have I heard any suggestion as to HOW intelligence ought to be reformed. And I doubt the solution is as easy as synching up the databases, because to me, that is just a minor symptom of the larger bureaucratic problem. $300B per year in defense should be enough money to protect this country in a legal way, without resorting to abuse. In other words, throw more money at the problem. That ought to go over really well in another government bureaucracy set up to preserve budget dollars over improving its own performance. Of course, not even Kerry would settle for that. So where should the dollars go? More electronic surveillance? That's the direction Clinton went, and it has arguably hamstrung our intelligence gathering efforts to the point where they missed a lot of the 9/11 hints. So how about good old-fashioned reliance on field agents? How are they going to do their jobs when they're under constant surveillance themselves by human rights groups like the ACLU, Human Rights Watch, etc? After all, if you don't want to see another Abu Ghraib, you better have Big Brother watching over these guys all the time. In any case, I've asked this question before, and I've gotten no real responses, other than "Well European nations seem to handle it." Yep, sure worked for Spain, didn't it? "Better intelligence" is a cop-out argument, one which I had admittedly used before but now am realizing that it's not enough. Tenchusatsu P.S. - Maybe a good first step would be to hire Rudy Giuliani to take George Tenet's place?