Great... Another Intelligenge Bureaucracy

[NATO AIR]

hard to find fault with this (at least on my part), its very similar to how i felt about the homeland security department

http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110006001

REVIEW & OUTLOOK

Meet the Nidniks
Washington gets another intelligence bureaucracy. Great.

Thursday, December 9, 2004 12:01 a.m. EST

President Bush likes to say that he knows how to spend political capital wisely, and sometimes we believe him. The bureaucratic reorganization that passed Congress this week under the rubric of "intelligence reform" is not one of those times.

The best that can be said for this bill is that it might not do too much harm as our government's spies divert their attention from catching terrorists to moving furniture. Somehow, eventually, maybe, the bureaucracy may even make it all work. But we sure wish everyone in Washington would stop with the back-slapping about how this reform rush-job is going to make us safer.

The bill provides for an additional 10,000 border police over the next five years, which might belong in an immigration bill (a bad one) but not in an intelligence bill. It will establish a "Privacy and Civil Liberties Board," whatever that is. It will require agencies to share information, something already accomplished thanks to the Patriot Act.

Crowning all of this will be the office of the National Intelligence Director. In theory, the job of the NID and the several hundred Nidniks on his staff will be to oversee and coordinate the work of the CIA, FBI, NSA and DIA. In practice, it probably means one of the following two things:

1) NID becomes another layer of the permanent Washington bureaucracy. As with the drug czars of yore, the office is at the mercy of the very agencies it is supposed to control. Eventually it is co-opted by one of them, probably the CIA, which provides the NID with most of his personnel.

Or (2) NID becomes another layer of the permanent Washington bureaucracy. The office accretes staff and influence. It interposes itself between the President and his intelligence-gatherers. It imposes more conformity on intelligence estimates, not less, and prevents competing views from reaching the President.

Note that in neither scenario is something useful accomplished. No spy satellite is boosted into orbit. Nobody is taught to speak Urdu, Farsi, Pashtun or Arabic. No intelligence assets are recruited in Iran or Syria or any other country that actually threatens us.
What we get instead are some small new rules (such as minimum-sentencing guidelines for trafficking in anti-aircraft missiles); a redundant counterterrorism bureau; a modified organizational flow chart in the executive branch; and a new Beltway big shot, who might be an asset to the President, but no more so than a competent Director of Central Intelligence. Congress, you will not be surprised to learn, escapes with only the barest self-reform.

As for the politics, this legislation now takes its place alongside other Administration cave-ins, the transparent intentions of which have been to satisfy a political constituency (the farm bill, steel tariffs) or deny the Democrats an issue (McCain-Feingold, the prescription-drug benefit).

It also illustrates how Mr. Bush's strategy of dealing with Congress differs from Ronald Reagan's or LBJ's. Those Presidents sent up specific legislation and sweated the details of whatever compromises they had to make. With the exception of his education and tax bills, Mr. Bush has made a habit of signaling that he'll sign just about anything Congress sends him. And he usually gets anything in return.

The Beltway wisdom this week is that this bill is a victory for the Administration, but we have our doubts. It was accomplished only after a public confrontation between Mr. Bush and his House Republican allies, the same folks he will need next year. The fissures are likely to reappear as we move toward Social Security reform, immigration reform and other far more significant items on the President's agenda that don't automatically unite all Republicans. It's a bad omen for the second term.

And for what? Instead of joining the Congressional stampede, the President could easily have put the legislation on ice until the March release of his own Robb-Silberman Commission's report on intelligence reform. Normal people understand that a lame-duck session of Congress is not the best occasion to foist the largest reorganization ever on the nation's intelligence services. The stall would have had the added virtue of being the right thing to do.

We realize nothing is going to stop Mr. Bush from signing this legislation. Matters would be helped, however, if the new Intelligence Director modeled his position on the National Security Adviser, whose job is not to impose himself on the departments but to mediate their differences and provide the President with a menu of best available options. It would also help if Mr. Bush appointed a NID who is not himself a product of the intelligence community and isn't blinded by its assumptions. We take it as some consolation that the same President who claimed to want this bureaucratic blowup now has to make it work.

 

[Doc Holiday]

I agree, the Director of Central Intelligence has the oversight responsibility. They just needed to give him the power to go with the job.

 

[rtwngAvngr]

And If bush hadn't done anything, he would have been accused of "dragging his feet on implementing intelligence reform".

 

[Doc Holiday]

So he acted and made it worse because he went with the Congressional knee jerk reaction.

 

[rtwngAvngr]

So he acted and made it worse because he went with the Congressional knee jerk reaction.

It's politics.