I have to say I agree with Christopher Hitchens’ succinct proposal of what to do about the CIA: The system is worse than useless‚Äîit’s a positive menace. We need to shut the whole thing down and start again.
Of course, that’s the easy part… Well, not easy, but easy to say. The more interesting question is how – to start over that is – assuming anybody has the cojones to shut the damn thing down in the first place. I also have to say I’m not optimistic on that score. Langley seems to be a self-perpetuating bureaucracy of immense proportions. And I don’t see anyone on the presidential horizon capable of dismantling it. [Maybe Huckabee can pray it away.-ed. I'll help. I thought you were an agnostic.-ed. The situation's getting desperate.]
No one has EVER managed to rid the world of a bureaucracy. Not even Hitler, and he had methods beyond anything civilized.
It’s interesting. Picture a couple of landowners, back in, say, 800 AD. They are agreeing on the ownership of the meadow they stand on. As witnesses, they will have their children standing by, and maybe the kids will get a cuff on the ear, to ensure they remember the event and the exact measure of that meadow. Also present (we assume these guys are fairly well off), is a local monk, who is recording – in Latin – the agreement on a piece of vellum. Maybe even two copies are made! Which will be stuck on a shelf in the castle.
And on they went with their lives and the meadow.
That monk, though, that CLERIC’s descendents has taken over much of the Western world. They run the health systems, and the educational systems, they keep records so we can pay taxes, they maintain our roads and our airports. And they are running the CIA.
However, as they have grown into huge blobs, the individuals within the bureaucracy don’t care – or know – what the actual aim of that bureaucracy. As far as they are concerned, it is all about the corner office with the windows.
This is called ‘decadence.’ And the CIA – and the UN – are excellent examples of this.
But, we will not get rid of them. The Romans tried, too, but the only thing that worked was the Barbarian Invasions.
I’ve been having the same thoughts for some time. Why is the CIA so bad? I suspect that there is a complete lack of accountability, both because of the clandestine nature of some of the work, and because the analysts working at home don’t get fired for when they get things wrong. And who knows when they get things wrong? Intelligence is pretty fuzzy anyway and it is only now and then that we have the opportunity to compare ground truth with estimates. We might as well use psychics and fortune tellers, the results couldn’t be much worse.
Myself? I would keep the NSA and turn most of the rest of the CIA’s chores over to the military, who at least have a vested interest in the quality of the product. The State Department might also play a role, but I suspect politics might have too much influence on their competence.
Oh, and I might mention the general decline of Liberal Arts education in this country. The CIA recruits from good schools, and I suspect a modern education does little to prepare students to look at the world with a cold and realistic eye informed by history and an understanding of human nature.
While we are at it, let’s give the State Department a barbed-wire enema, a pull-through with a wet army blanket, or any other way you may find to phase it.
I’m with Chuck, for the record, regarding a Liberal Arts education.
Spies have always been hard to manage and organize, even for dictatorships and countries who don’t have the moral issues with spying that we have. In the US, you get recurring periods when intelligence activities are more and more restricted for moral reasons, followed by some disaster that leads to an “anything goes” mentality. Before WWII, we disbanded our spying organizations altogether.
I remember hearing the accusations that the CIA falsified intelligence reports about the Soviet Union to influence policy back in the 80′s. At the time I thought they were conspiracy theories, but they turned out to be accurate. That alone should have been enough, but the agency escaped major reforms. Then came Aldrich Ames.
The liberal criticism is that the CIA is all too effective. I think the emerging consensus among conservatives is that they’re incompetent. Their defense is that “we want our enemies to think we’re a bunch of screw-ups”. I don’t think post-Iraq that that holds water anymore.
The only questions is how you actually go about replacing the CIA in a real and effective way, without losing the valuable sources we have or trigger a wave of leaks from disgruntled employees. That’s a VERY tough question.
Unfortunately it’s not just the CIA. When the Bush Administration created the unwieldy Homeland Security organization, it mushed something like fourteen separate intelligence groups into one amorphous blob, and that is the monster which spew out the NIE.
There was a benefit in having separate competing intelligence agencies, one of which was the ability to call “bullshit” on the competition.
Now, if they all got to doing that for reasons of turf and jealousy, it’s obviously counterproductive. BUT if the caller of bullshit has good evidence to back up the call – and critically, if the administrators whose responsibility it is to weigh the claims of opposing agencies have reasoning abilities and principles beyond cheap political advantage – then the country is better served than it is today with its Wal-Mart big-box intelligence.
It was no wonder that Dick Cheney cultivated some military intelligence agencies as alternate voices to the CIA. Look how bitterly the CIA and its stooges at the NYT complained – they should have welcomed the competition. By their complaints one could see they wished exclusive access to the King’s ear so to speak, the better to shove policy in their preferred direction.
They forgot that the elected administration sets the policy, and the agencies act in support – not as the Opposition.
Reading the posts a few days late but here is an opinion. The Bush administration lost the opportunity to fight the intelligence agencies’ revolt by failing to indict a few NYT reporters
and CIA leakers in 2005-6 when they had the chance. There was that Democratic woman holdover on the cusp of retirement. Forget the name. Instead of talking tough about charges, it should have issued grand jury subpoenaes and brought the reporters in through the front doors of the US District Court, cameras at the ready, expensive K Street attorneys at their side ($ 750/hour; retainer: $50,000 up front)
and made them take the 5th. Indict if it had the evidence; let Judge Reggie Walton deal with ‘em.
All the while taking a healthy bite out of their savings. Leakers and reporters get the message.