Please Don’t Fix Our Intelligence System Beyond Repair!
By Charles Cole (08/06/04)
So, here we are again! Yet another government-sponsored commission has spent millions of taxpayer dollars to study “what went wrong” and why we were “unprepared” for 9/11. Result of the “study”? Six hundred pages of bureaucratic recommendations on how to “fix” the problem. This, of course, is the standard Washington, DC answer to every problem on the planet: convene a commission, hold hearings, “discover” the patently obvious, and propose stale (and expensive) Beltway “solutions”.
One very disturbing aspect of this process is that it has proven feckless and counter- productive so often in the past. And yet, led by the “mainstream media”, the American people continue to lend credence to such futile bureaucratic exercises. Boiled down to its essence, the report of the 9/11 Commission proposes to “solve” our intelligence problems by adding another layer of bureaucracy and creating a new position which some have called an “Intelligence Czar”. And why not? The Drug Czar concept certainly has worked well in the War on Drugs, now hasn’t it?
And Mr. Kerry’s take on the 9/11 report? He claims that President Bush “rushed to war”, but adds that during wartime, one needs to act quickly. This is the same Senator John Kerry who, after serving many years on Senate committees dealing with intelligence and foreign affairs, has suddenly, magically “discovered” that our intelligence capabilities were deficient prior to 9/11.
Anyone interested in researching this matter can easily (without spending millions of dollars) track the “chain of evidence”, as the lawyers say, and determine the major reasons that America was so vulnerable to the terrorist attack of 9/11. It has nothing to do with whether our “allies” in France and Germany were helping us, or whether the Arab Street “hates us”, or whether Saddam Hussein was or was not part of the Al Qaeda plot.
Put quite simply, we didn’t see this outrageous debacle coming because of a series of actions, most with Democrat fingerprints all over them. First, there was the typical do-gooder approach to “fixing” the intelligence system foisted on the CIA by Senator Frank Church in the mid 1970-s. His stated reason for gutting the agency’s capacity to conduct intelligence operations had to do with eliminating the “abuses” of the Nixon Administration. Next came the meddling of Admiral Stansfield Turner, Jimmy Carter’s CIA Director. In the late 70-s, Turner decided the agency needed to conduct its operations in a more “ethical” fashion, resulting in deep cuts in the espionage branch of the agency. Next came the turn of the Clinton Administration. Its “contributions” to the CIA included the infamous “guidelines” of 1995 with Senator Torricelli (D-NJ) as the lead attack dog. This nonsense impeded the CIA’s ability to recruit “foreign assets and sources with human rights concerns”. Translation: you’re only allowed to hire Mother Teresa types to spy for you! Another gem from the Clinton era was the now famous policy described in the Gorelick memo of 1995 named for its author, Jamie Gorelick, an official of the Clinton Justice Department. This “proactive measure” erected the very barriers between domestic operations (the FBI) and “foreign intelligence” operations (CIA) which guaranteed that information about terrorists could not be effectively shared among these agencies!
And after years of such meddling (some would say sabotage), the current standard bearer for this wonderfully patriotic party wants “quick action” to “fix” the problem which led to 9/11. Where was he during the eight years when Mr. Bush’s predecessor was busy, between peccadilloes, meddling into everything from school uniforms to car seats for toddlers to God knows what, all while Al Qaeda was planning and carrying out a series of murderous attacks on Americans?
After decades of supporting his party’s mucking up our intelligence efforts through their naïve, do-gooder, politically correct meddling, Mr. Kerry now brazenly states that, “It is time for serious reform” (of our intelligence operations). His “Plan for America” states that he will “Transform our intelligence services … and strengthen our … clandestine services, so that we have our own robust human intelligence network”.
What typical leftwing tommyrot! First they meddle into areas in which they have little or no competence, most often as a sop to various special interest groups with “causes”. Then, after things (predictably) go afoul, they decry the failures of those upon whom they have foisted a “mission impossible”. Finally, they propose measures to “fix” the problem (usually the very problem their incompetent meddling created in the first instance!)
It’s long since time for Americans to say to the Democrat Party, “Please stop ‘fixing’ our problems!” Perhaps the out-of-touch left wing of the Democrat Party is the problem!
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