Posted on 10/07/2004 5:40:02 AM PDT by OESY
...A new National Intelligence Director with a staff of several hundred will ride herd over the CIA, the DIA, the NSA, the FBI and the Pentagon....
...[I]f this "reform" passes, a President might no longer get the competing views from the Pentagon because its intelligence arms will have been wrested away from the Defense Secretary to report to the same new national director.
Such a move... runs the risk of separating intelligence from the war fighters who need it. One genuine success of recent years has been the integration of real-time intelligence with commanders on the battlefield....
The intelligence changes... are being imposed by politicians who have given the subject at most a few hours of thought.
If nothing else, a change of this magnitude deserves more deliberation. That's the view of such national security pros as Dr. Kissinger, as well as George Shultz, David Boren, Bill Bradley, Sam Nunn, Gary Hart, Robert Gates and William Cohen....
The list of elected officials who are embarrassing themselves in this episode is longer even than usual. It includes Senators Joe Lieberman and John McCain, who know better but late in their careers seem to be latching onto anything that will win them media huzzahs. John Kerry grabbed the issue as a political club against President Bush, who has responded by playing me-too, much as he did on campaign-finance reform....
Worst of all are the 9/11 Commissioners, who settled on this furniture reshuffle as their own internal compromise to save themselves from partisan dysfunction, and have since exploited the fear of another attack to ram this through a frightened Congress. What a tragic irony it would be if the body that was supposed to help us avoid another 9/11 ended up making another one more likely.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
Do away with the CIA...have 4 or 5 different intelligence agencies staffed by the services...Air Force, Army, Navy and Marines (maybe even Coast Guard) separated and all led by the Joint Chiefs. These personnel would be accountable under the UCMJ. If the present intelligence people (read Joe Wilson) were accountable under the UCMJ it is my opinion that 9-11 would have been stopped!
Amen! I shudder when I think of our national intellegence in the hands of a huge cadre of Sandy Berger Clones. Even Senate 'Advise and Consent' might cause a lack of killer instinct.
What we must do is... "Find a dog who'll eat a dog."
"The problem with intelligence sharing or the lack of it, seems to be caused by Bureaucracy and the bureaucrats fighting for supremacy, even against the administration. It seems that all government stiffs think that info is power and shouldn't share with people.
How you fix this problem eludes me, but it seems that changing the environment by exposing it and naming names would or could be a start.."
The turf war pre-dates my service time by probably a lot of years. Just squabbles amongst siblings, not necessarily a bad thing. To me, the Administration benefits from the different viewpoints. Inserting a new level in the process is not a good step; it's a bad step.
Sometimes to kill the rats, you have to go into the sewer.
Auralog makes excellent language learning programs (interactive PC based programs), and they're not insanely expensive, and they offer an Arabic program: www.auralog.com/american.html
Pimsleur makes good language learning tapes, etc., but is quite expensive: www.pimsleurapproach.com
There's also Rosetta Stone, which I see in a lot of publications I read (I'm a translator), but which I haven't actually seen and I don't know its cost: www.RosettaStone.com
There are many on-line learning programs sponsored by proseltysing Muslims that I suggest you avoid.
Thanks you're most kind...
Maybe I can learn this language and do something with it...
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