Tuesday, August 10, 2004

"Not Worth a Blue Ribbon"

This article marks an early step in a necessary evolution: The demystification of the 9/11 Commission. Gerecht judges their report harshly:

the report overall is quintessential blue-ribbon Washington: conventional, conservative, and exuberantly bureaucratic in its analysis and solutions.
and also thinks at least some of the commissioners are pious frauds:

THE 9/11 COMMISSION says it wants to have a national debate about its report. Actually, that's not quite true. It would prefer that the Bush administration and Congress, feeling the heat of its bipartisan mandate, submit quickly and completely to its collective and deliberate judgments.
***
the commissioners' intention to turn themselves into a continuing, nationwide road show, have made this report, like the commission's televised hearings, into a political drama with possible repercussions on the elections in November.
As a former CIA case officer he takes dead aim at several of the Commission's recommendations. Gerecht makes the obvious point that consolidating intelligence under a Cabinet czar will increase groupthink.
Differing opinions within America's intelligence community would tend to become fewer, not more, as a new bureaucratic spirit radiated downward from the man who controlled all the purse strings and wrote the performance reports of the most important players in the intelligence community.
***
Competitive analysis is likely to be better in organizations that are truly independent of one another. The commission appears to be in love with synergies and economies of scale. But this isn't the way it works in the intelligence business, operationally or analytically. Five hundred analysts do not necessarily do a better job than fifty. Fifty case officers deployed correctly will certainly do a better job than 500 deployed as they are now.
A related point-- since the czar will be a political appointee and will have budget authority over nominally apolitical bodies (CIA/FBI/NSA, etc.) it seems that the Commission has come out in favor of politicizing intelligence, at least to a degree.

No comments: