Centerfield

There's just been a lot of politics with how Bush has dealt with the CIA. I think there became an atmosphere there where people thought they could get ahead if their findings matched up with the preconceived notions of the guys up top. As for intelligence czar, you can add all the people you want to stand up there and talk to us at press conferences, but nothing really changes until you decide that all parts of the government should be telling the truth no matter how inconvenient politically the truth might be.

Good thing they're calling it a czar though. Someone else needs to be as useless as the Drug Czar.

After reading the first graph,(its too late tonight for the whole thing) I have to say this is the worst possible perversion of the proposed reforms.

The inteligence world is a somewhat necessarily dark world full of intrigues and ever shifting goals. That the CIA's goals might necessarily differ from a theater commander's goals is not unheard of. The result of such a conflict of goals could well be bloody and disasterous. That is not to say the CIA would not want to win the war, just that its goals may not be in accord with the commanders current needs. That is just one reason to have a military intelligence system. What I see in this proposal is a Military further removed from the process and without an official intel capability of its own.

Though I have felt that the proposed reforms don't solve the problem of politicians designing intel to fit the problem, that is only the most obvious problem the reforms aim to resolve. This proposal however makes it more likely that intel will mostly solve the president's problems.

I think this whole plan is very misguided, and too motivated by an attempt to score the big political points of "doing something" about the intelligence shortcomings pointed out by the 9/11 commission. First, if the problem is lack of coordination, I fail to see how breaking up a fairly coordinated organization like the CIA will help.

Second, the thing I keep screaming in my head at these calls for someone to head the intelligence community is, we already have someone to head the intelligence community! The person is called the DCI, Director of Central Intelligence, which is the post for which Porter Goss has been nominated. The job is usually referred to as head of the CIA, which is part of it, but officially the position is supposed to head the US Intelligence Community. If the problem is lack of authority over this community, there is no need to necessarily create a new bureaucracy/destroy the CIA, etc; it is to give the DCI the power he needs to do the job. This would be the simplest solution, as well as the least expensive, I would think.

I'm not always one to complain about the creation of new government agencies, if there is a need, but I cannot see why that is necessary in this case. And I definitely find problems with the idea of breaking up the CIA to improve coordination of intelligence. And this is a bipartisan attack, if you want to call it an attack, because the Kerry campaign is applauding this Republican plan.

While it's nice to hope that our intelligence gathering will improve, the cynic in me wonders what things will chagneg that are helpful as opposed to cosmetic.

No sensible person thinks adding an additional bureaucratic layer will imporve things, and yet it seems to be on the way, with added bad problem of this czar not having much real power.

The other obvious problem is that the sorts of things our intellignece arms in engage in are the sort of things no politicians never want to know about. The more political our intelligence gathering becomes, the more people are involved whose primary concerns are plausible deniability. The way i see it, adding a czar makes the probability of an @ss-covering festival go up a bit.

IMO, the main thing that needed to happen to improve our intelligence gathering was 9/11, which improved our motivation a thousandfold. The other good thing that happened was Chalabi, which makes it more likely that admin neocon egomaniacs will actually listen to the spooks once in a while.

bk:

Along the lines of what you were saying (sort of), there's a real interesting dispute starting to heat up amongst the neocons:

http://preemptivekarma.com/2004/08/more-problems-for-camp-w.html