No Time to Lose (by John Lehman)

Wall Street Journal ^ | October 1, 2004 | JOHN F. LEHMAN

[OESY]

...After intense work, Sens. Joe Lieberman, John McCain and Susan Collins have introduced comprehensive legislation that differs on only a few matters with the Commission recommendations. The Senate leadership has pursued the same bipartisan course that enabled the Commission's five Democrats and five Republicans to achieve unanimity on comprehensive and decisive findings and reform recommendations. The House is following suit with somewhat different legislation and there is no reason now why differences cannot be resolved in a Senate-House Conference and a landmark bill presented to the president before the election recess. This accomplishment, to paraphrase Mark Twain, will gratify our friends and astonish our enemies. But while we are close, we are not yet there.

We commissioners and our staff of some 80 seasoned professionals worked exhaustively and exhaustingly for 20 months to establish the facts, study the lessons and derive from them concrete reforms to fix a broken system. The most important of these were on policy and strategy; what we must do as a nation to defeat Islamist terrorism.

The next set of recommendations address how we are to do these things, and among them are deep changes to our very dysfunctional intelligence establishment. We make quite clear that fiddling with organization charts and reorganizing the bureaucracy does not of itself solve problems or dictate human behavior. But our investigation made shockingly clear that our current calcified, layered, stove-piped intelligence bureaucracy is an insuperable obstacle to common sense and good intelligence. Our recommended reforms are designed to break up those layers and tear down the stovepipes to create an environment in which creativity, risk-taking and professionalism prevail over careerism and bureaucratic process; an environment that will attract, hold and promote excellence, people with a passion for the product and not the procedure....

[OESY]

Mr. Lehman, a member of the 9-11 Commission, was secretary of the navy in the Reagan administration.

[harpu]

This would have been a great post except that it "HAD" to be excerpted and those of us who do not subscribe to the WSJ will never know the 'rest of the story'.

Geez...bring back the good ol'days when you could learn something from the threads rather than be teased.

[harpu]

This would have been a great post except that it "HAD" to be excerpted and those of us who do not subscribe to the WSJ will never know the 'rest of the story'.

Geez...bring back the good ol'days when you could learn something from the threads rather than be teased.