Disband the CIA
I’m a hawk who changed his dovish plumage on a crystal-blue morning in September 2001. I no longer want the USA to coexist with its enemies: I want to see them destroyed. I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s under the era of detente with the Soviet Union. This policy made sense since the USSR was too big to destroy and we had to live with it. However we don’t have to live with Iran and Saudi Arabia – our nation’s current enemies.
But the CIA is not the agency to do it, and Gabriel Schoenfeld agrees. He quotes former CIA director Robert Gates from his memoir From the Shadows:
As a result of the lack of innovative and creative personnel management, I believe this agency is chock full of people simply awaiting retirement: some are only a year or two away and some are twenty-five years away, but there are far too many playing it safe, proceeding cautiously, not antagonizing management, and certainly not broadening their horizons, especially as long as their own senior management makes it clear that [risk-taking] is not career enhancing. How is the health of CIA? I would say that at the present time it has a case of advanced bureaucratic arteriosclerosis: the arteries are clogging up with careerist bureaucrats who have lost the spark. It is my opinion that it is this steadily increasing proportion of intelligence bureaucrats that has led to the decline in the quality of intelligence collection and analysis over the past fifteen years — more so than our declining resources . . . or congressional investigations or legal restrictions. CIA is slowly turning into the Department of Agriculture.
The biggest reason to disband the organization is the simple fact that it has become a large organization. I know large organizations. I tend to work for them; I have seen them from the inside, and realize that it might be okay to rely upon them to manage your insurance or even your bank account, but national security? My bank recently had a security breach and only told me so after my bank account had been drained. Would I trust this bank with the physical security of 300 million Americans when it has difficulty managing data security for a few million bank accounts?
And that’s the problem with the CIA. I’m sure that there are some good people who work for it, just like the manager at the local branch of my bank. However these people would be even more effective in smaller, more nimble and less bureaucratic ones than the CIA. As far as I’m concerned any organization concerned with spying should not have a sign directing to it’s headquarters from the interstate.
Does this have to do with bitterness towards their recent report exonerating Iran that even the French government doesn’t believe? Of course. But why should I believe the CIA is right about Iran today when it was wrong about Iraq 4 years ago?
In my experience working with data I have learned that it is better to have no information than unreliable information. The CIA is a large organization which produces unreliable intel. The fact that it was wrong about Iraq is more excusable since its intel was similar to independently gathered intelligence data of other countries. Anti-war folks like to hitch their star on that intelligence failure, forgetting that it wasn’t just the CIA that screwed up. The mossad, M1, French and Russian intelligence agencies all agreed that Saddam was actively hiding his program from the UN inspection teams. Saddam just didn’t fool George Bush he fooled the world.
The CIA remains Truman’s greatest mistake – not his firing of General MacArthur or his handling of the Korean War. It is a mistake that should be rectified by the next president regardless of his/her party affiliation.
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