UNSHACKLING SPIES (An article from the NY Post, great read)

July 22, 2004 -- IF this or the next administration heeds the advice of the 9/11 Commission, we'll see an intelligence czar in the president's cabinet. While this may do no harm — as long as it doesn't further stifle dissenting opinions — it's like trying to save the horse-and-buggy trade by adding another boss to the livery stable.

Our intelligence system is still designed to face off with the Soviet Union. Despite some minor shifts in the line-and-block charts, it remains yesteryear's organization, lagging behind the innovative genius of international terrorists and even the Internet. Worse, the institution feels little real desire to change: It remains committed to technological solutions in an age of infernally human threats.

Our intelligence agencies enjoy institutional permanence. Reformers, on the other hand, have brief political mandates. The careerists wait them out. There are few things more difficult than forcing meaningful change on any bureaucracy. Toss in the green-door syndrome — the ability to hide one's sins behind Top Secret cover sheets — and reform demands a ruthlessness that go-along-get-along Washington finds intolerable.

From top to bottom, our intel system is woefully out of balance — despite statistically minor improvements. We all have heard repeated calls for more regional analysts, for more linguists and more clandestine agents — more HUMINT — but little happens. The big money still goes to buy backward-looking, hyper-expensive technologies, not to the personnel account. Managers agonize over adding 10 new analysts, but blithely spent $10 billion on a new set of gee-whiz toys.

While hi-tech intelligence collection means have their place, the problem facing us today isn't that we glean too little data, but that we don't know what to make of the information we already collect. Even in the field of hi-tech collection — our preferred domain — we have yet to complete the transition from the switchboard to the keyboard. We get the worst of both worlds: Too few first-rate minds on duty, and hi-tech systems that haven't mastered net-world.

High-level managers worried less about being powerfully right than they did about being demonstrably wrong — a fatal difference. Politically risky analysis might make it out of the armed service staffs — which deal in matters of life and death — but rarely made it through the civilian gatekeepers. With few exceptions, high-level intelligence managers are extremely cautious. That's how they reached their rarified positions. They aren't about to risk their reputations on some hot-potato hypothesis proposed by a staffer who knows how al Qaeda works, but not how congressional sub-committees function. Wise subordinates take their cue: Their goal is to appease the boss, not to open his eyes.
A past example: Prior to 9/11, making too much noise about "Islamic" threats just painted you as a "loose cannon," even a bigot. Even now, any mention of Islam as a causative factor has to be qualified with gushing remarks praising the religion in general. If intelligence officers cannot speak frankly, we will always lag behind our less-scrupulous enemies. And Americans will die. Because the truth is uncomfortable.

The 911 commission talked about "war on terror" as being unusefully vague. I think it is usefully specific, because it is the alternative to either not speaking of war - which would be too vague - or declaring a religious war, which would be specific but not actually useful.

That is what must be done in public government councils. In classified councils, there needs to be a way of calling a spade a spade - Islam has an uncomfortable tendency to justify violence against Christendom, and the US is now, from the POV through which our enemies see us. de facto the core of Christendom. Islam is and will be a source of political hostility to the US, which, securlar and Democrat-leaning as it is or even may be, Islamic people will see as a field for violent or at least potentially violent "missions work".

But of course, let a Democratic administration arrive in DC and the PC tendency would be everywhere else but in those classified councils - and would therefore easily be a career-killer for the candid even within those councils, if committed to print. This is therefore a good idea which cannot be implemented unless the Democratic Party implodes.

One way of looking at it is to say that the military - which after all has the mission for planning for extremely unlikely contingencies like the need to invade, say, Bolivia - can be more detatched than the civil intelligence agencies. And that PC thinking is a box inside which some people allow their thought to be restricted, which is smaller than the box inside which military analysts think.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.