Thursday, September 21, 2006

The Intelligence Mess

How the courts forced me to give sensitive information to Osama bin Laden.

BY ANDREW C. MCCARTHY
Wednesday, September 20, 2006 12:01 a.m.

(Editor's note: This article first appeared in April 2004.)

Intelligence-gathering is something of a square peg in the round hole of contemporary political morality. It is about unearthing that which is willfully concealed, an enterprise that necessarily calls for invading privacy and inducing betrayal--discomfiting acts in an age that exalts the individual and his liberties above community and country.
It is about assuming and preparing for the worst in an era that sees "bad" as an outmoded adjective for "different," another dash of enlivening spice in a rich social stew. Intelligence is gimlet eyes in a world of rose-colored glasses.

Now, however, that foreign pathologies long denied have visited their excesses upon us, many among the benignly tolerant have turned overnight into the equivalent of ambulance-chasers. In particular, they have confidently laid at the door of America's intelligence apparatus the success of America's enemies on September 11, 2001.

[...]

How did this wide wreckage in our intelligence capacities come about? One incisive answer has been given by Mark Riebling in his gripping history, "Wedge: How the Secret War between the FBI and CIA Has Endangered National Security" (1994, reissued in 2002 with a new epilogue). Riebling's thesis is that the problem is longstanding, that it has a single "root cause," and that this root cause is institutional.

In his telling, a full half-century's worth of national disasters--from Pearl Harbor through the Bay of Pigs, the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, Iran-Contra, and 9/11--can be traced directly to intelligence failures, and those failures were proximately caused by turf-battling between our two great rival agencies.

[...]

Read the full commentary, at OpinionJournal.com

posted by Pam @ 6:05 AM |

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