Fixing the Intelligence Community

Perhaps I am the only one who sees the irony in a conservative president appointing a new cabinet-level official to preside over the intelligence community as a whole, in turn creating a new layer of bureaucracy to fix the problems within the current, malfunctioning bureaucratic strata. While Bush has rarely showed his conservative side in how he runs government, asides from attempting to discriminate gays directly into the ground, he still, supposedly, considers himself staunchly conservative -- but, would a true conservative simply expand government to handle pre-existing problems within that government? In this case, yes, because going against the wishes of a bi-partisan commission that has, indirectly, found the president's war policies in contrast to the safety of the nation would be another dire mistake that would be reflected within the electorate. Although, a Secretary of Intelligence will not solve the problems currently inherent within the intelligence community. What is required is wide-reaching reform within the CIA, FBI and Defense intelligence agencies that can cure the "lack of imagination" cited by the 9/11 commission as the primary reason for the failures of 9/11. Richard Clarke in a NY Times op/ed (registration required) today echoes this sentiment, pointing out how the culture within the intelligence community must change in order to repair the overall apparatus charged with keeping the United States secure:

First, we need not only a more powerful person at the top of the intelligence community, but also more capable people throughout the agencies - especially the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency. In other branches of the government, employees can and do join on as mid- and senior-level managers after beginning their careers and gaining experience elsewhere. But at the F.B.I. and C.I.A., the key posts are held almost exclusively by those who joined young and worked their way up. This has created uniformity, insularity, risk-aversion, torpidity and often mediocrity.

The only way to infuse these key agencies with creative new blood is to overhaul their hiring and promotion practices to attract workers who don't suffer the "failures of imagination" that the 9/11 commissioners repeatedly blame for past failures.

Second, in addition to separating the job of C.I.A. director from the overall head of American intelligence, we must also place the C.I.A.'s analysts in an agency that is independent from the one that collects the intelligence. This is the only way to avoid the "groupthink" that hampered the agency's ability to report accurately on Iraq. It is no accident that the only intelligence agency that got it right on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction was the Bureau of Intelligence and Research at the State Department - a small, elite group of analysts encouraged to be independent thinkers rather than spies or policy makers.

Bush has promised to act on many of the 9/11 commission's recommendations within the coming days, but if he and the public, especially, believe the appointment of a new cabinet official will fix the problems inherent within the system, we are well on our way to another disaster.