Nevertheless, an agency that faces Islamist terrorists can find the courage to face down snide questions from a leftist Congressional staffer fresh from his last semester’s diversity workshop at Princeton. It can also find the nerve to deliver bad news to policy makers ( ” intelligence consumers” in CIA lingo). In fact, it might be a good idea to delineate where intelligence analysis ends and policy making begins. A recent CIA roundtable indicates that at best, the lines are very blurry on both sides of the divide. This lack of clarity is the fault of the administration and Congress, not the CIA or it’s analysts but the confusion is evident- as is the unwillingness of political appointees to accept non-linear ( probalistic, multi-tiered) estimates that are a far better reflection of reality. The report is worth the time to read.
The CIA needs reform – current intelligence production should be separated from strategic intelligence and only the results coallated in NIE or some other format; clandestine operations in all its facets must become more robust while analysis needs an infusion of resources and acceptance of alternative analytical methodologies. The political branches need to accept that to ask the CIA or the IC to make predictions or engage in covert-operations runs the risk of error or failure. When these things fail and the CIA has done what it has been asked under the limitations that the law directs, then the blame for the failure lies with Congress or the administration.
The shifting of blame to ” faceless bureaucrats” for two generations has demoralized the men and women of the CIA, a service that is critical to American security. It has made them risk-averse, it has made them conventional and it has made them into lawyers out of self-preservation.
What it hasn’t done is make the rest of us one iota safer.
UPDATE: Earlier, I mistakenly identified the historian Douglas Brinkley as the historian Alan Brinkley. I have corrected the error and offer my apologies to both gentlemen. Mea culpa.
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Dave Schuler:
November 16th, 2004 at 1:57 am
The business of operating an effective intelligence organization in a free and open society like ours is a bit of a paradox. On the one hand it is a dangerous world and we need the kind of information that only an effective intelligence organization can offer. On the other how can you have a closed organization with such an open society?
Historically, the answer has been that our intelligence organization has not been very effective and simultaneously both too opened and too closed; too opened in that leaks are common and it’s been too easily penetrated by our enemies; too closed in that it doesn’t get the kind of oversight it should. The years of domination by Ivy League bozos didn’t help.
I wonder if we’ll be going through a period in which Central Intelligence is in a chronic state of turmoil until they’ve digested today’s reality that information that was formerly an expensive asset is now readily available to anyone.