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

To: LindyBill who wrote (89760)	12/8/2004 4:49:36 PM
From: LindyBill	Respond to of 793914

An Evaluation of the Intelligence Reform Bill American Future Blog Earlier today, Dave Schuler of The Glittering Eye posted a highly critical commentary on the Intelligence Reform Bill, claiming that its passage won't make us more secure. His conclusion is that the provisions of the Bill may make it easier to identify the perpetrators of future terrorist attacks, but won't reduce the likelihood of their occurence. If the Bill is to make us safer, it must improve the quality of the information and judgments supplied to the president and other key policymakers. The distinction between informationm and judgments is critical. I suspect that the quality of information will improve: It will be easier to connect the dots. In addition to creating an office of intelligence director to oversee America's 14 intelligence agencies, the Bill mandates that information be shared among them. Information sharing will be facilitated by a computer network that will allow counterterrorism investigators to instantly query a massive system of interconnected commerical and government databases. Federal wiretapping power is expanded. For non-citizens, it eliminates the requirement that the target be connected to a foreign country. Considering the transnational character of Islamofascism, this change is well-advised. The Bill includes automatic pretrial detention for terrorism suspects, even when it can't be shown, as current law requires, that a suspect endangers the public or is a flight risk. An amendment to the "material support" statute that further criminalizes association with foreign terrorist organizations is part of the Bill. For the first time, involvement in the planning or execution of a terrorist act isn't required for a federal crime to have been committed. Membership in a government-designated terrorist organization suffices. Whether the quality of intelligence will improve is problematical. Today's Washington Post editorial raises several important questions: Will a national intelligence director without day-to-day authority over operations and agents in the field be as capable as a CIA director of making judgments about intelligence and operational priorities? What will be the practical relationship among the three senior intelligence officials who now will be nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate, including the director of the counterterrorism center as well as the CIA and national intelligence directors? Which one can best brief the president? Will this massive wartime reorganization help or hinder the critical task of bolstering the CIA's operations on the ground in difficult and dangerous places such as Iraq and Iran? Will the reforms diminish or increase the likelihood that future intelligence judgments will fall victim to "groupthink," or political influence by a presidential appointee? If the quality of the new intelligence organization's judgments is no better than that of the old one, the hypothesized improvement in information quality will have little or no effect. While I'm skeptical that the Intelligence Reform Bill will make us safer, I'm not yet willing to rule it out. Posted by Marc Schulman americanfuture.typepad.com

To: LindyBill who wrote (89760)	12/8/2004 8:45:44 PM
From: KLP	Respond to of 793914

Seattle Weekly is a VERY left wing rag ....And don't forget, Ballard is the home of the big Lenin Statue.... (check out google: ---lenin statue ballard wa ----) These guys are so far left they think Nikita Sergueievich Kruschev was far right.... translate.google.com But few have preached harder against the Christian right's wrongs than the Rev. Rich Lang of Seattle's Trinity United Methodist Church in Ballard. "This administration is a culture of death, and so is the religious right," says Lang. In his Open Letter to George Bush, published in Real Change, Lang thunders, "You claim Christ but act like Caesar. There is blood all over your hands with the promise of even more blood to come. You sit atop the nations like the Biblical Whore of Babylon openly fornicating with the military men of might." His sermon "George Bush and the Rise of Christian Fascism" (posted like Luther's theses on the church Web site, www.tumseattle.org) rails that "the power and seduction of this administration emerges from its diabolical manipulation of Christian rhetoric . . . the mirror opposite of what Jesus embodied. It is, indeed, the materialization of the spirit of Antichrist: a perversion of Christian faith and practice."