Edwards’ Campaign Requests a Grade Change
Yesterday I ranked the intelligence reform plans of six presidential candidates (3 Dems, 3 Republicans) based on their essays in Foreign Affairs. John Edwards didn’t do so well.
This morning, I got a phone call and email from the Edwards campaign asking me to take a look at a recent speech and a newly unveiled counterterrorism plan. At first, I thought I wouldn’t, since it would screw up my nice, fair, apples-to-apples comparison (if the counterterrorism plan were so important, why weren’t any seeds of it planted in Edwards’ Foreign Affairs piece?) Considering extra campaign material for only one candidate would give Edwards an unfair advantage. Kind of like allowing extensions for some students but not others.
But then I figured that any campaign that scanned blogs that closely and cared that much about how they stood on intelligence reform should get a second look.
So I’m changing his ranking from a distant and poor 4th to a much more respectable 2nd place, just behind John McCain.
Here’s why:
Edwards proposes a bold and novel idea: a new Counterterrorism and Intelligence Treaty Organization, which he describes as the “modern-day equivalent of NATO for terrorism.” CITO would more systematically engage and coordinate political, diplomatic, law enforcement, and intelligence efforts across the world. He also advocates improving human intelligence by spending more money on foreign language scholarships (good idea), doing more outreach with Muslim communities (good idea) and holding the Director of National Intelligence more accountable for reform (also good).
2 Biggest weaknesses:
1. Edwards focuses most on the one area of intelligence that may be working best: foreign cooperation. Many intel officials — not the spinning kind, the ones who actually complain about the slow pace of reform — tell me that foreign liaison was pretty darn good before 9/11, and even better today.
The people who really need a cooperation treaty don’t live in Cairo or Berlin or Paris. They live right here at home. Today, 16 federal agencies, 40+ regional “fusion centers,” and thousands of state, local, and private sector leaders are involved in counterterrorism intelligence. Coordination is often poor, and that’s to say nothing of the uneven quality of collection and analysis tradecraft (a CRS report on fusion centers recently found that these centers don’t even use a standard form or standard terminology for reporting vital information to other officials.) Edwards, to his credit, suggests creating a new Deputy Director of National Intelligence for coordinating the feds with state and local efforts. Good start, but one appointment is no silver bullet.
2. Holding the DNI accountable for intelligence reform sounds good, but it’s waaaay easier said than done. No president since Harry Truman has succeeded on this one because it’s boring for voters and politically costly for presidents. Unless candidate Edwards starts talking about intelligence reform with the same zeal he talks about mill workers, I doubt that President Edwards will give this the attention that it requires.
Wow. I'm surprised JE's people are reading this blog. Although Elizabeth Edwards is rumored to be a frequent blogger...
I don't know about about this stuff to evaluate the details, but, to me, that Edwards is evolving his plan is a good sign.
The last thing we need is an inflexible, "resolute" leader.
"Thank God George Bush is our president." -Rudy Giuliani
November 8, 2007 4:14 PM | Reply | Permalink
Gee, Perfesser, I wonder what purpose that would serve?
Seems to me that it's the intelligence equivalent of "teaching the controversy" when no controversy may exist. Why? Well, if you had the Dean of your college coming into your office every day asking you to review your work to find something that he was particularly fixated on, how would you react? Maybe, eventually, after enough growling and browbeating from him, you would take a "fact" that if, oh, you were high and worried about your advance to tenure, you might be able to say bent his way under particular circumstances.
Imagine your surprise the next day when you see the Dean on maybe, oh, "Meet the Press" talking about a newspaper article that he had "leaked" your work to, and then quoting that article to create the image that there might just be some point to debate.
No conspiracy theory here. Just a little recent history.
With regard to Edward's plan, I might ask the question of you, why are you so fixated on the domestic side of this equation? What you seem to pass by is that the terrorists that poked our collective butts on 9/11 would have been looked at and examined more closely if we had better screening on the Saudi side of the street.
So if Edward's is listening to these blogs, stop being Obama's attack dog and keep churning out policy- so you have answers when Hill & Bill don't.........
Alphonse ( Al ) Kada
Iranians are fighting the Americans in Iraq so they don't have to fight them on the streets of Tehran
November 8, 2007 5:14 PM | Reply | Permalink
There are actually some starts on organizations like that. I'm not suggesting they were Bush Administration initiatives, but in some cases were existing foreign groupings that then asked for US participation. One antiterror conference started with the ASEAN countries, then spread a bit, bringing Australia in. A little later, the US was invited to help in training, and, with caution on both sides, intelligence sharing. Some of the professionals on both sides, with very real concern over sensitive sources, recognize that the Asian countries are going to have better human intelligence, while the US and key allies are going to have better communications intelligence.
Singapore has been very proactive in this. Some material I've written at Wikipedia may help: page down to "ASEAN and related groups"
Intelligence sharing is not trivial. Go to the top of the intelligence article hierarchy I've written there, and scan down to CCIRM, which is a NATO doctrine, and read about the differences in how things went in Bosnia and Kosovo, among NATO militaries that already have spent a lot of effort about interoperability of command and intelligence information. It may be more appropriate to think of local law enforcement being to national intelligence as military tactical units, Army/Marine battalion or company, to national (military) intelligence. The tactical units, for many reasons, get a digest focused on their needs.
There are also huge problems, and not great answers, between the conceptual mindset of law enforcement and national intelligence organizations. The FBI has been incredibly slow in getting basic information exchange capabilities. Some, such as one aspect of sending email at the TS/SCI classification level, was described, a while back, as not having gotten accomplished for a single workstation, much less a LAN, by the Justice Inspector General--after several years of trying. I can only say that when I was doing the network architecture for the US Y2K Information Center, it was a pretty simple matter of filling out some forms, and describing the technical environment, to get a JWICS all-source connection in a month or so. I didn't even have a current clearance at that level, but it was easy enough to set up.
In all fairness to the FBI, CIA has been more reluctant to share information inside the intelligence community than other agencies. NSA has been the leader in things like Intellipedia, the Wikipedia-like collaboration tool that has versions that operate at different classification levels, from sensitive-but-unclassified to TS/SCI.
--
Howard
*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]
November 8, 2007 5:52 PM | Reply | Permalink
There are actually some starts on organizations like that. I'm not suggesting they were Bush Administration initiatives, but in some cases were existing foreign groupings that then asked for US participation. One antiterror conference started with the ASEAN countries, then spread a bit, bringing Australia in. A little later, the US was invited to help in training, and, with caution on both sides, intelligence sharing. Some of the professionals on both sides, with very real concern over sensitive sources, recognize that the Asian countries are going to have better human intelligence, while the US and key allies are going to have better communications intelligence.
Singapore has been very proactive in this. Some material I've written at Wikipedia may help: page down to "ASEAN and related groups"
Intelligence sharing is not trivial. Go to the top of the intelligence article hierarchy I've written there, and scan down to CCIRM, which is a NATO doctrine, and read about the differences in how things went in Bosnia and Kosovo, among NATO militaries that already have spent a lot of effort about interoperability of command and intelligence information. It may be more appropriate to think of local law enforcement being to national intelligence as military tactical units, Army/Marine battalion or company, to national (military) intelligence. The tactical units, for many reasons, get a digest focused on their needs.
There are also huge problems, and not great answers, between the conceptual mindset of law enforcement and national intelligence organizations. The FBI has been incredibly slow in getting basic information exchange capabilities. Some, such as one aspect of sending email at the TS/SCI classification level, was described, a while back, as not having gotten accomplished for a single workstation, much less a LAN, by the Justice Inspector General--after several years of trying. I can only say that when I was doing the network architecture for the US Y2K Information Center, it was a pretty simple matter of filling out some forms, and describing the technical environment, to get a JWICS all-source connection in a month or so. I didn't even have a current clearance at that level, but it was easy enough to set up.
In all fairness to the FBI, CIA has been more reluctant to share information inside the intelligence community than other agencies. NSA has been the leader in things like Intellipedia, the Wikipedia-like collaboration tool that has versions that operate at different classification levels, from sensitive-but-unclassified to TS/SCI.
--
Howard
*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]
November 8, 2007 5:52 PM | Reply | Permalink
General "Hanging Sam" Williams got all his intelligence officers together and yelled at them as loudly as only Sam could. Sam told the cowering miscreats they could all be replaced by sergeants. The sergeants would do what they were told. (Generals don't know much about sergeants.)
One line in a lengthy intelligence report hinted that we might not be winning the war in Vietnam.
That was long before there was a war in Vietnam. JFK was just a lackluster senator and hadn't yet made his push for a real war. Nixon was busy traveling the globe promoting the American Dream for Vietnam but few were paying attention. Eisenhower was concerned but, like Alfred E. Neuman, Ike didn't worry much.
Much later Lyndon Johnson told reporters that Nixon was being unfairly criticized because the President had access to information far better than the Great Unwashed. Nixon surely had reason for what he was doing in Vietnam.
What Nixon was doing, what LBJ did, what JFK did was what their intelligence told them to do because they told their intelligence agencies what to tell them.
Maybe there is more to this intelligence stuff than shifting the organization chart around.
BTW this reader is greatly surprised and pleased that a very important blogger like Amy Zegart can revisit her opinion. There may yet be hope for the country and planet.
Best, Terry
November 9, 2007 4:26 AM | Reply | Permalink
"Unless candidate Edwards starts talking about intelligence reform with the same zeal he talks about mill workers, I doubt that President Edwards will give this the attention that it requires."
No candidate is talking zealously about intelligence reform because it's really no voter's big issue. Yes, it's something that needs to be done but this isn't 2002 -- most people don't see this as the most vital task.
I'm curious as to why Edwards needs to show you more enthusiasm before you'll believe he can get the job done when none of the other candidates have shown enthusiasm for this topic either.
thosethingswesay.blogspot.com
November 9, 2007 5:21 AM | Reply | Permalink
Good for you for revising, after all we're not voting based on a single paper (no matter how prestious the publication). I think the CITO proposal is one of the better and more innovative Edwards has put out. I hope he pushes it more, it's not just good policy, it's the kind of security proposal that real people can understand.
November 9, 2007 8:10 AM | Reply | Permalink