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

To: LindyBill who wrote (56607)	7/28/2004 5:39:06 AM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793994

In the Room With Osama We need more spooks, not more bureaucrats. BY BRENDAN MINITER - Mr. Miniter is assistant editor of OpinionJournal.com. His column appears Tuesdays. What the 9/11 Commission's report comes down to, House Armed Services Chairman Duncan Hunter told me, "is that we didn't have anyone in the room, nor did we have anyone who knew anyone in the room, when the decision was made to hit America." The 9/11 Commission obviously delivered a very comprehensive report last week, but as lawmakers consider which recommendations to implement, Mr. Hunter's singular warning about the need for more covert operatives to go on the offensive against al Qaeda should stand out. He is no newcomer to defense issues and chairs one of the committees most heavily involved in providing $40 billion of funding and overseeing 15 different intelligence agencies. He's also a Vietnam vet and has a son serving in the Marine Corps in Fallujah today. The day the Commission released its report, I dropped in on him in the Capitol to ask what he thought. In his office, while riding the mini-train connecting House office buildings with the Capitol itself and within just a few steps of the House floor, he relayed a few concerns to me that will have to be addressed. Of course, Mr. Hunter isn't the only lawmaker thinking about this issue right now. President Bush is weighing what should be done while working from his Crawford ranch this week and the relevant congressional committees will soon convene--perhaps as early as next week--to consider the Commission's proposals. One of the recommendations is to create a new National Intelligence Director to oversee the CIA as well as the FBI and have a hand in controlling nearly every other intelligence agency. This new director would have "cabinet level" status and perhaps even head a new department. The allure of this approach is understandable. The Commission found that one reason why the country was caught unaware on Sept. 11 is that in the 1990s billions were slashed from intelligence budgets. The cuts came across the board, but it was the deep cuts on human assets that left us in the dark on al Qaeda's operations. The problem the Commission found was that spies had no institutional force to protect their funding, so when the cuts came they lost out to lobbyists pedaling hardware as the new way to spy. But that's not the whole story. In retrospect, the 1990s were a failure of leadership as much as they were a failure of institution-building. Having more bureaucrats on the roster probably wouldn't have mattered much during the Clinton administration because at the time the feeling was that we didn't really need covert agents operating in dangerous situations. After all the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union had collapsed. They called it the "peace dividend" and team Clinton was all too happy to cash in on it for other spending priorities. The CIA was particularly hard hit, losing 25% of its officers and a third of its stations in the 1990s. The Bush administration has been adding more spies over the past three years, but we're told the best way to make sure our spy networks are never eviscerated again is to centralize the intelligence agencies under a new director. The danger Mr. Hunter is worried about, however, is that rushing in such a fix could create as many bureaucratic problems as it is intended to solve. One such problem is that, like kindergartners, bureaucracies don't share very well and the 9/11 Commission recommends forcing several intelligence agencies to be shared by two departments. Perhaps the most troubling of these arrangements comes with the creation of Defense Intelligence--a new office that would report to both the new intelligence director and the secretary of defense. DI would oversee the Defense Intelligence Agency (which has it's own spies and analyzes data), the National Security Agency (which breaks codes) and other agencies. In peacetime this might not present a large problem, but what happens when the nation goes to war and the secretary of defense needs to concentrate assets on developing battlefield intelligence in real time? Will the troops get all the intelligence support they need or will their needs compete against other, domestic, bureaucratic priorities? Another problem comes in preventing a culture of "group think" from developing in the intelligence community. Mr. Bush has already been accused of creating such an environment so that he could receive only the information he wanted to hear in the run up to the war in Iraq. But as Mr. Hunter told me, before voting to authorize the invasion, Congress invited representatives from all the intelligence agencies to Capitol Hill. To pick one example, when Saddam Hussein was found to have tried to buy high grade aluminum tubes on the world market the president feared he was buying materials for a secret nuclear program. Some intelligence officers testified that they had similar fears. But others said that, in fact, those tubes could be used for nothing other than one of Saddam's missile programs. If all of the intelligence agencies were in one department, Mr. Hunter concluded, it is unlikely that these competing ideas would have been presented to Congress. President Bush has already created one new department on his watch--the Department of Homeland Security--and it's not too surprising that the Washington establishment is now encouraging him to go out and hire a new bureaucrat, give him a big desk, a fancy title and maybe even a shiny new department to run, or at least "cabinet level" status. The lesson to learn from the 9/11 Commission, however, is that terrorism must be taken seriously at all levels of government. It's important to get all the agencies working together in combating terrorism and not to replace old bureaucratic hurdles with new ones. But with or without a new department, we will still need a few spies to infiltrate al Qaeda. Copyright © 2004 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

To: LindyBill who wrote (56607)	7/28/2004 6:26:02 AM
From: KyrosL	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793994

This doesn't seem to bother you. You are putting words in my mouth LB, as usual. I am dismayed by the loose immigration policies in the US and the lack of a full proof national identity card that allow nuts of all sorts to settle here legally or illegally. As for Moslems specifically, radical or otherwise, I admit I dislike them intensely, but I don't feel like I have to repeat that dislike ritually in every post. By the way, are you a Ku Klux Klan sympathizer? I did not see any post of yours denouncing the KKK <g>.