American Intelligence Problems
By PhilosoGuy at 7 January, 2010, 5:28 pm
According to a new report from Afghanistan, American intelligence gatherers are hopelessly inept and relatively useless. This is quite unsettling considering that we have been in Afghanistan now for nine years and this problem has yet to be addressed. Maybe this sheds some new light on why we still haven’t been able to catch Osama Bin Laden
I guess we can just add this on to the list of failures we have been made aware of in the last few weeks: the Christmas Day bomb attempt, the recent bomb scare at Newark Airport, and now the failure of the intelligence community. Not to mention the tragic death of CIA agents at the hands of a double agent in Afghanistan, which we were made aware of in the past few days.
Obama is now taking the blame for these failures in a recent press conference where he quoted Truman’s “buck stops here” line. “I am less interested in passing out blame than I am in learning from and correcting these mistakes to make us safer. For ultimately the buck stops with me,” he said.
In taking the blame for these mistakes Obama threatens to thwart real reform and anything beneficial coming from these eye-opening events. The blame lies in many different areas in government and other agencies and entities, but not solely with the President: the bloated bureaucracy and miles of red tape; turf wars that dominate the intelligence community and create inefficiencies and prevent “connecting the dots”; and general incompetencies widespread throughout the airport security personnel and now, perhaps, the military’s intelligence branches. If Obama does not identify which areas have incompetencies, inefficiencies or are downright broken and hold those at fault accountable then we can be sure that the same lapses and mistakes will happen time and time again.
However, if the President does not do something to truly remedy these problems within the next few months then we can be sure that the next lapse will truly be his fault. I just hope that he hasn’t sapped all of his credibility and clout on that chimera of a health care bill.
In Response To: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE60342S20100107 and http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE60342S20100107
The White House Report on the Failed Bomb Attempt on December 25 Can Be Found Here: http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/summary_of_wh_review_12-25-09.pdf
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Good points, I think I will definitely subscribe! I’ll go and read some more! What do you see the future of this being?
From its inception intelligence and intelligence agencies have been vital parts of campaigns, no matter how big or how small the effort – how small, think of Lord Baden-Powell and the boy scouts.
However, it appears as if we in the west, NATO, have moved away from human intelligence and more and more towards technologies.As we now have teen-gamers with low social/human skills, we now also have intelligence agencies comprised of gamer-skilled techies able to run the latest computer intelligence hardware and produce reems of unintelligble data on enemies; yet they are still unable to answer simple human questions of the people they are gathering said intellience on.
Perhaps what we need is more people on the ground actually interacting with people, and truly and accurately sussing-out who are friends and foes.
Perhaps what we need are agencies staffed with more than former military, myopic,white caucasians.It is important that NATO and the West realise that the threats are not only from former Warsaw Pact Communists but also radicals from around the worldI. It is essential that all peoples of all hues and creeds work in our intelligence agencies because contrary to movies and popular thinking caucasians do stand out like sore thumbs in most of the world -the myth of a white teflon camouflaged James Bond image just doesn’t cut it anymore!
Perhaps, at the end of the day and the end of my diatribe what we truly need are agencies and agents not obcessed with their jobs and their importance in their jobs but more so people who are doing their jobs of connecting to people and persuading all to work for the greater good…not personal/bureau/agency agendas.