Quote:
Originally posted by Bad_Rich_Chic
I wasn't aware that the pre 9/11 intel problem was telling the Admin what it wanted to hear. (I though that was the pre-Iraq criticism.) I thought the pre 9/11 problem was: (i) lots of people had collected bibs and bobs that might have alerted the powers that be, but everyone was collecting and no one was analyzing; (ii) group-think meant that no one took al Q seriously as a domestic threat, because "everyone knows" terrorists are just desperate, pathetic mental defectives; (iii) the US is very good at collecting intel on what foreign governments are doing but sucks at intel on just about anything else (like non-state actors or major populist (non-G) changes or events); (iv) no one agency is in charge of pulling together and analyzing ALL intel collected from ALL sources, meaning that no one can put together a total picture; and (v) to the extent anyone did make enough of a leap to consider an effective al Q domestic attack, the practice of developing analysis by consensus and sourcing everything to death that has been SOP since Bay of Pigs, and the resulting intelligence culture of CYA above all, meant that any such imaginative assertion would be shouted down.
The pre-Iraq failures are of a different nature, since that was the sort of intel (information about what government actors are up to) that the CIA was supposedly actually good at ....
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Yea, sorry, should have been more specific. I have reservations regarding the whole intelligence czar proposal and the rush to adopt the 9/11 commission recommendations in general without further debate on this issue. IMHO, the commission members are acting like an uber-congress, and it some how has become taboo to challenge their recomendations. Further, seems to me that another layer of government is exactly what we don't need.
By the way, your concerns above could be alleviated in ways other than an intelligence czar, but somehow that has not entered into the debate.
