Breaking Intelligence

Authored by Michael Pate on February 3rd, 2004 at 5:45 PM

If U.S. intelligence is broken, it’s clear that the Bush White House broke it. - Scott Rosenberg

The CIA’s scientific pretensions were established early on by Sherman Kent. In his 1949 book, “Strategic Intelligence for American World Policy,” Kent argued that the truth is to be approached through a systematic method, “much like the method of the physical sciences.” This was at a time, just after the war, when economists, urban planners and social engineers believed that human affairs could be understood scientifically, and that the social sciences could come to resemble hard sciences like physics. If you read CIA literature today, you can still see scientism in full bloom. - David Brooks

One utterly predictable response to the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington were calls by members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees to �shake-up� the Central Intelligence Agency. Some committee members want to see CIA Director George Tenet replaced, others are demanding radical changes in both the analytical and operational divisions of the agency. It would be shortsighted for the intelligence committees to place the blame for this latest intelligence failure exclusively on the CIA�s management. If the committees are interested in genuine reform, they would do well to begin by acknowledging their own culpability in crippling the agency. Under both Democratic and Republican chairmen, the intelligence committees have transformed the CIA into the functional equivalent of the Department of Agriculture, preventing the agency from acting in a shrewd and, as is sometimes necessary, ruthless manner. Any �reform� is doomed to fail if Congress continues to play its role as a partner, if not outright �owner,� in the management of the CIA. - Stephen F. Knott

Emasculation of our intelligence services began during the Sen. Frank Church, D-Idaho, and Rep. Otis Pike, D-N.Y., committee hearings in the 1970s. As a result of those hearings, Congress enacted the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act (FISA) in 1979. Liberal Democrats in control of the Congress wanted to protect Americans against domestic spying. What they ended up doing was to protect terrorists and others who might do us harm. - Walter Williams

Last week a report issued by the House Intelligence Committee put a large measure of the blame for the U.S.’s inability to prevent the 9-11 attack on the Torricelli principle, rules that prohibited the CIA from recruiting people with criminal records as spies and informants. - Carl Limbacher

To illustrate what he called the “brilliant, charismatic” Clinton�s “moral relativism,” O�Reilly spoke about the passage of the “Torricelli Principle” which prohibited the use of intelligence sources with criminal records. It was inspired, O�Reilly said, by the president�s discovery that human rights violators were working as paid CIA informants. “To Clinton, that sounds good. It�s politically correct. We can�t have those guys,” said O�Reilly. The effect, according to O�Reilly, was a decrease in both the quantity and quality of intelligence information gathered from many foreign countries. - Aine Cryts

On the CIA, Kerry sponsored a bill to cut $1.5 billion from the budget for intelligence gathering. Then after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon on September 11, 2001, he asked why America’s intelligence wasn’t better. His explanation: He wanted the CIA to devote more money to human intelligence and less to technical means. He sought, he explained, “to change the culture of our intelligence gathering.” He didn’t explain, however, how slashing the CIA budget would achieve that. - Fred Barnes