Missing Intelligence in the 2008 Campaign
I don’t get it.
National security issues are huge this election cycle. So how come the major presidential candidates have paid almost no attention to fixing the most important national security weapon we have in a post-9/11 world—intelligence?
All those Democratic and Republican candidates can’t say enough about terrorism or Iraq on the campaign trail. And yet they aren’t saying much of anything about the intelligence agencies that helped lead us into Iraq in the first place and couldn’t stop the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history.
I know, I know. Most voters don’t stay up nights worrying about whether we need an MI5 or how many CIA clandestine case officers speak Pashto. So I went directly to Wonk Central, Foreign Affairs magazine. If serious discussion of intelligence reform would be anywhere, I figured, it would be here. Six of the candidates—Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards, Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, and John McCain—have all published essays there. (Fred Thompson hasn’t written one yet, so he’s not included). Here’s how they stack up, best to worst:
#1: McCain
The senator knows his stuff. He’s got the most serious discussion of military intelligence transformation, a real plan for improving language and cultural education of intel and military officials, and recommends the creation of a “modern-day OSS,” a lean, mean, new intel organization to combat terrorism.
Biggest Weakness: Punts on the $64,000 question: what the heck do we do with the 16 other intelligence agencies that are struggling, and failing, to reform themselves?
#2: Obama
He actually mentions six important words: “We need to revisit intelligence reform.” Also advocates improving technology for collection and information sharing (a biggie), investing in language and cultural training, and making sure we have competitive intelligence assessments (another biggie).
Biggest Weakness: Revisiting reform is not reform. Meaningful change in intelligence cannot succeed without relentless presidential leadership. This was a good paragraph, but it was nowhere close to a call to action.
#3: Clinton
Makes some obvious but good points about getting clandestine operatives out of the office and into the streets, restoring morale (how exactly, she doesn’t say), increasing language proficiency, and raising the profile and status of analysts.
Biggest Weakness:
Coordination, coordination, anyone?
Snarky Comment: Enhancing the status of analysts is important, but how about enhancing the quality of analysis while you’re at it?
Tied at a distant 4th: Edwards and Romney
Both have a decent throwaway line about the importance of intelligence, but little more. Romney mentions some vague idea about interagency coordination. I’m not sure what on earth he means. And Edwards seems to think the key problem in intelligence is resources. It isn’t. More money will just buy more of the same.
#5: Giuliani
He’s last not because of what he omitted, but because of what he said. I’m quoting here: “Constellations of satellites that can watch arms factories everywhere around the globe, day and night, above –and belowground, combined with more robust human intelligence, must be part of America’s arsenal.” Wow. Somebody’s been watching a little too much “24.”
What’s Missing Across the Board
1) The FBI, which desperately needs help. For those who think things are going well, take a look at the Senate Intelligence Committee’s October 23, 2007 hearing. The picture is not so rosy. Here’s one of my favorite quotes: “Last I saw, only 33 out of 12,000 agents speak Arabic, and some of them not very well.” The source of this vicious rumor? 9/11 Commission Chairman Tom Kean.
2) Nobody talked about Congressional oversight of intelligence, which the 9/11 Commission rightly called “dysfunctional.” It still is, and it’s one of the most important things we have to get right.
In her Foreign Affairs essay, Hillary declared that, “80 percent of the 9/11 Commission recommendations on homeland security have now been enacted, principally as a result of the Democratic Congress’ work.” Wanna know about the other 20%? The recommendations that didn’t even make it into Congress’s “Implementing the 9/11 Commission Recommendations Act” last summer? You guessed it. The ones that called for reforming Congress.
What's Missing In Your Analysis:
The most important and vital aspect of intelligence reform is the preservation of civil liberties in the U.S. Coordination, hiring new analysts and all of that has to take a back seat to reigning in the NSA, ending illegal wiretaps (not by legalizing them) and stopping the agencies from using extraordinary renditions and torture.
Before we can empower the intelligence community in order to make it more effective, we need to civilize the intelligence community in order to make it trustworthy.
thosethingswesay.blogspot.com
November 7, 2007 7:18 AM | Reply | Permalink
Where government jobs are concerned, candidates tend to evaluate policies in terms of votes. If you are planning to give military recruiters a bigger budget, for example, and expand the size of the military, then you have just given everyone with an economic stake in that expansion a reason to vote for you. If you say you are going to cut somebody's budget or cancel somebody's job, then you probably lose votes unless there is a huge public outcry in favor of slashing those budget items.
If I'm an intelligence analyst, and some candidate says they are going to "enhance the status of analysts", then I'm thinking that sounds good for me. If the candidate says, however, that we need to reform and reorganize intelligence analysis, then I smell a possible budget cut. And if a candidate says, "we need to do something about 16 intelligence agencies with overlapping functions and an inefficient and redundant Byzantine organization", then I start to smell big budget cuts.
Losing those votes might not be so bad if I can pick them up elsewhere, but how many people in the country actually have intelligence reform so high on their list of priorities that they will reject a candidate because that candidate fails to address the issue and propose some reorganization?
So the result is that there is a built-in preference for proposals that add to military and intelligence budgets, as opposed to cutting them.
I wonder if there might be another factor at work that makes candidates touchy about intelligence policy. Members of intelligence communities probably have potential access to a lot of dirt, which they can anonymously share with opposition research teams if some candidate begins to sound too aggressive about reform.
November 7, 2007 8:03 AM | Reply | Permalink
The more that I hear, read and think about what the "national security" meme has morphed into in the last 7 years, I have come to the considered opinion that it is all bunk.
There are too many really smart people running around in this country to *not* have figured out these issues already. The only way that effective reforms could not have been implemented by now is by design.
I say that because the entire notion of "terrorism" is to use the strength of the opponent against them. We can not protect ourselves in an "absolute" sense- if someone is ready to give up their life to effect an act of violence, there is no preventing it. Even if Ghouliani has his wacked-out idea of "a policeman over every shoulder", s*** is still gonna happen.
Ask yourself a question-
If a burglar came into my house through an open window, stole my stuff, and dropped a ski mask on the way out, would I:
A. Put a glass to the wall of my neighbor and try to listen in on his conversations to see if he had my stuff, or
B. Go looking for anyone with a ski mask and try to torture a confession out of them, or
C. Close and lock the window
I realize that this is beyond simplistic, but it's a right analogy of the social engineering invoked by the terrorist. Maybe I'm reading too much into it from Susan Faludi's posts, but getting poked in the butt on 911 has caused a massive change in our society. Instead of doing the simplest of prevention techniques we have gone completely off the deep end in our "shame" rage, and enabled the worst in our nature to become our "face".
To watch the Senate Dems cave in once again is not only distressing, it's beginning to institutionalize criminality for the government that takes power in '09. I could rationalize a period of time when the hysterical abuses of civil society might be catharsis for the trauma of the butt-poking. There comes a time in any therapy, however, when circular arguments must be broken and forward progress needs to be initiated. I believe we are past that point and need to change our therapy regimen.
Which leads me back to my first statement.
Should we close and lock the (border) window? Yes.
Should we lock up the cockpit door on our 50 ton flying gas bombs? Yes.
If Arabic is the enemy language du jour, should we have more Arabic speakers? Yes.
Should we ask for the same level of ID and track sales of ammonium nitrate like we might do for a fully automatic weapon? Yes.
Should we institutionalize domestic "spying on demand"? No.
Should we institutionalize torture as a weapon? No.
Should our representatives be cowed into acquiescence by demands from a dictator? No, Democrats worth my vote should at least have the guts of a Pakistani lawyer.
And it's this last one that really bothers me, because it leads me to believe that the Dems know it goes against "conventional wisdom" to say that a sweeping makeover of our civil society is not going to keep us "safe", so they are just going along with whatever Musharraf Bush is demanding. I'm sure that the calculation is "we'll fix it quietly when we take over".
Problem is, what happens if they don't get to take over?
Alphonse ( Al ) Kada
Iranians are fighting the Americans in Iraq so they don't have to fight them on the streets of Tehran
November 7, 2007 9:08 AM | Reply | Permalink
I guess that is the main reason we had a wall of separation between the CIA and FBI before the reorganization.
November 7, 2007 10:03 AM | Reply | Permalink
In her Foreign Affairs essay, Hillary declared that, “80 percent of the 9/11 Commission recommendations on homeland security have now been enacted, principally as a result of the Democratic Congress’ work.”
Nancy Pelosi introducing HR 1, January 2007:
"Enacted." The CIA was enacted in 1947. It was less than effective on 9/11.
Agreed, the "other" 20% should be relevant. Similarly relevant: a) What percentage of "80%" is actually implemented? b) And if implemented, how effective or operational?
"80% enacted" would be more meaningful if 80% of reported Fs, Ds, Is were now, at minimum, Cs.
November 7, 2007 10:46 AM | Reply | Permalink
There is a common misconception that the Central Intelligence Agency is entirely involved with, well, intelligence whereas roughly half of its personnel and budget are devoted to operations. This includes various activities secretly directed by the President against foreign governments and other foreign entities, including violence, destruction and propaganda.
We're all familiar with he CIA history of instigating coups (Iran) and running wars (Nicaragua), and also its rendition and torture program.The Central Intelligence Agency has received approval at least twice in the last several years to conduct an “information war” against several countries in the Middle East, including Iran, Lebanon and Syria, according to current and former intelligence officials.
In addition, the Bush Administration has been running operations out of the Defense Department that are not subject to Congressional oversight, intelligence sources say. These programs appear murkier, and have included support for an alleged terrorist group in Iran.
Book review: "From covert acts against Hussein to secret Afghan missions and the overthrow of leaders and governments around the world, "The CIA's Black Ops" charts the CIA's secret operations and controversial plans, revealing a country fascinated by covert action and surveying how such operations have become a part of U.S. foreign policy. Essential for any surveying international politics."--Amazon.com
ecotourism
WeGoEco.com
November 7, 2007 11:46 AM | Reply | Permalink
Not in anyone's defense, but given the media habit of 'highlighting' political speak or a debate - Al Gore's 'sigh,' Dean's yell, Hillary's momentary lapse into unease, one singular sentence, even one challenging word - the candidates are well-advised to be as 'vanilla' as possible, which pretty well guarantees a dearth of substance.
(I remember a Nixon/Kennedy debate and the next day's news coverage which duly reported Nixon's haggard look and, tacitly, Kennedy's glowing good health. Those became the 'substance' of the debate.)
Media need 'hooks', something to keep viewers viewing, circulation up, talk-shows confrontational - anything to keep the numbers up. Unfortunately, the public ends up hiring government workers, yes even presidents, who may have a profound affect on our lives and about whom we know next to nothing.
November 7, 2007 2:02 PM | Reply | Permalink
Exactly right. Someone thinks the candidate doesn't focus enough on intelligence and someone else thinks the candidate doesn't focus enough on health care and everyone has criticism for the candidate.
November 7, 2007 2:14 PM | Reply | Permalink
Have you seen the proposal from Paul Pillar, who was the National Intelligence Officer for the Middle East from 2000-2005, for a mechanism for Congressional oversight? From my perspective, the "big 8" briefings on waived SAPs or equivalent SCI, with no staff involvement, is irreparably broken. Clearly, the executive branch uses technical experts in preparing the ultransensitive programs.
Pillar suggests setting up a new Congressional agency, a mini-GSA or CRS if you will, with a nonpartisan, professional staff of intelligence experts, cleared for all-source, to present analyses to Congress. Some of these analyses certainly could be classified, but not necessarily at the highest compartmented levels.
Pillar mentioned that relatively few members requested NIEs and such that were releasable, and that when they were requested, they didn't seem to be read in detail -- as Rice commented that she didn't read all the WMD footnotes and annexes. *sigh* as far as I can tell, Eisenhower was really the only President that made the NSC staff fully effective, with some individual successes later on. PD-59 showed originality, but I certainly can't say the Carter Administration had a firm hand on national security.
I used to work for a retired DIRNSA in his first civilian job after retirement, and I'd often go on trips with him to answer technical questions about our (unclassified) research in communications networks. We are both interested in history, and, without going into certain details, he gave me a fascinating perspective of the intelligence community and that of a top intelligence executive. After one rather harrowing set of questions, at which he kept a poker face, he broke up laughing in the car, telling me I knew far more about cryptography and SIGINT than he did, but we got into a serious discussion of the different skill set needed to operate at a major agency or intelligence community level. He was much better prepared than I would be to talk to Congress at a policy level, and discuss overall objectives. That's analogous, I think, to the difference of briefing the Big 8 and having expert, independent staff available to Congress -- and Congress doesn't necessarily need to know all the technical details of sources and methods, but they do need information to judge risk, cost, and benefit.
As an aside, I've been doing a major rewrite of most of the intelligence articles on Wikipedia, and am amazed at some of the confusion in the newer doctrinal definitions. I've found at least three contradictory definition of OPSEC, as much as everyone talks about it. Overclassification is shunting into lots of "sensitive but unclassified" not exactly subject to FOIA, but a lot of material is coming out in new classified documents, although the content is still mostly available with some OSINT digging.
--
Howard
*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]
November 7, 2007 2:18 PM | Reply | Permalink
Prof. Zegart, are you familiar with Pres. Clinton's PDD-56, Managing Complex Contingency Operations? Essentially, the PDD recognizes that civilian responses from many different agencies, including intelligence agencies, have to be combined with military responses to complex situations if they are to be effective.
The PDD came to my attention because so many former Bush people, like Powell, Wilkerson, and Leverett, would refer briefly to it as useful guidance in talks and papers after they left the administration.
Apparently, even Bush finally recognized its usefulness and set out his own version of it in NSPD-44, Mananagement of Interagency Efforts Concerning Reconstruction and Stabilization, in Dec. 2005. However, at least from the outside, the Pentagon still seemed to be in charge of everything after NSPD-44 was issued, so it may not ever have been implemented.
All of which is to say that not only do the intelligence agencies need coordination within their own sphere, but then they need coordinating within the rest of the government.
What you need is sustained outrage...there's far too much unthinking respect given to authority. Molly Ivins
November 7, 2007 3:26 PM | Reply | Permalink
Congress is dysfunctional. They don't want oversight because they don't want responsibility or accountablity. Just one of the reasons I won't be voting for our likely nominee is that I flat out do not believe that she believed what passed for "intelligence" about Iraq.
It doesn't matter how good the agencies are if the political leadership receiving the analysis is either an ideological faith based zealot or a politcal hack who doesn't give a damn.
November 7, 2007 3:29 PM | Reply | Permalink
Good information, Seashell, thanks.
November 7, 2007 4:39 PM | Reply | Permalink