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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ilaine who wrote (53707)	7/11/2004 9:35:09 AM
From: Mary Cluney	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793957

<<< There is nothing wrong with our intel. Well, maybe you did not watch the news last night, or read the newspapers this morning?>>> I'll repeat it. There is nothing wrong with our intel. I have been around long enough and seen enough audits of organizations to know that there will never be a large organization that can pass an audit. The audit procedure really starts by assuming something is wrong. You go along looking for things that are wrong. Auditing organizations (government, private, whatever) will hire kids straight out of college and bill them out at $200.oo per hour. These eager beavers do not know how things should be, but they know they should be better. I don't care what kind of an organization you have, you will never pass an audit. The only kind of organization that has a chance of passing an audit is if they don't do anything. If all they do is sit around and CTA. Making sure they don't violate any regs. To be sure, our intel organizations, like all large organizations will have waste, redundancy, inefficiencies, and even wrong doing. But I am willing to bet, if you went in there looking for things that they do right, you will find an awful lot of good stuff. The real problems is that at the very, very top, - during stressful times, we tend to give our elected officials a pass. They can go and do anything - take a lot of short cuts - violate a lot of laws - because we want to feel safe. Abraham Lincoln took a lot of liberties with our Constitution - but we kind of understood. He was in an existential fight to keep the nation together. FDR also took liberties and he was in 2 giant fights. To get out of the depression and to win a World War. Since then every President thought he was in an existential fight - LBJ and the falling dominoes, RMN and the Watergate enemies, Clinton wagging the dog to take the limelight out of his fight with stained spots, and of course this President. It does not seem like its an easy lesson to learn. The Constitution was set up to prevent Presidents from taking short cuts. How does this all relate to our intel mess. Well most of our Intel budget is controlled by DOD and if DOD wants information to reflect its point of view, our intel is set up so efficiently that they can produced the desired results. There is nothing wrong with our intel.