IGNORANT INTELLIGENCE
BY JULIANNE MALVEAUX
What’s up with the Central Intelligence Agency? If one looks carefully
at their record in past years, one can only suggest that their intelligence
is of the tremendously deficient kind. They publish little information
publicly, hiding behind the fact that they have to keep secrets from the
public. But even Ray Charles can see that the CIA emperor is walking around
nude. They’ve got a bloated budget, brim over with inefficiency, and may
have had their heads so firmly in the sand that they ignored information that
might have prevented the terrorism of September 11.
After the World Trade Center was attacked in 1993, after all, didn’t
anybody think that the same forces would try it again? After embassies were
bombed two years ago, did anyone think that Osama bin Ladin was finished with
his jihad against the Untied States? The CIA is supposed to know what’s
going on, but they’ve used obfuscation and alarm to avoid providing complete
information to the public. They argue we don’t need to know, but their b
udgets suggest that we need to pay. Imagine that any other organization of
government had $30 billion to burn and no need to justify expenditures!
It’s not just the CIA. There are more than 13 agencies which provide
strategic foreign intelligence under the National Foreign Intelligence
Programs. All of them fight turf wars, and few of them talk to each other.
Supposedly, Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge is to coordinate these efforts.
Every time he addresses the issue of coordination, though, he is vague and
insubstantial. Is Ridge bigger than bureaucracy? Probably not.
Congressional oversight of “intelligence” is as diffuse as intelligence
activities themselves. Perhaps a dozen Congressional committees provide some
form of oversight. There are Senate and House Committees on Intelligence, on
Terrorism, on Security, and never the twain shall meet. With overlapping
intelligence and oversight, it appears that the left hand really doesn’t know
what the right hand is doing.
Perhaps they felt no need to know, or to coordinate. With our nation in
a state of subdued panic, intelligence agencies can get away with almost
anything, and they have. In the name of security, we have suspended a whole
set of civil liberties, suspending the concept of habeas corpus, and making
attorney-client privilege a thing of the past. With the national mood
pushing a false sense of unity, people are more likely to give up their own
power than to criticize the misuse of power on the part of our nation’s
intelligence agencies.
Still, it seems that we ought to recognize how ignorant our intelligence
has been. Despite the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, and the
conviction of it perpetrators, we have done little to improve our ability to
translate Arabic documents or to recruit agents who speak Arabic. Too many
say that we’d have to recruit “unsavory characters,” or the criminals of the
world, but that’s not necessarily the case. Couldn’t we have grown a cadre
of translators in an 8-year period since 1993? With the right career and
financial incentives, we might have identified a hundred, or a thousand,
folks who could be trained in Arabic language and translation. We didn’t do
it because we didn’t think we had to. WE had enough electronic surveillance
to find anything out (as long as it was transmitted in English).
Electronic surveillance seems no substitute for human intelligence. I
don’t know which computer failed to predict Iran’s invasion of Kuwait before
the Gulf War started. It was common knowledge that Iraqi forces were
building up along the Kuwaiti border. Did we think people were gathering
there for a tea party? Electronic surveillance did not confirm the
invasions, but common sense might have. Somehow our “intelligence” agencies
dropped the ball.
Citizens might raise more questions but we have moved into a “by any
means necessary” mentality, one that will allow the CIA mistakes and
intrusions into our civil liberties because we feel we cannot do any better.
WE feel that we have to accept this agency’s abuses because there is no other
agency that can keep order, peace, and knowledge. Indeed, some Congressional
proposals would provide the CIA with more power, not less, rationalizing that
this agency has the best chance of coordinating the work of all the other
intelligence agencies.
We give up our citizenship rights, though, when we shrug off the
ignorance of our intelligence agencies and assume that we can do no better.
We need intelligence, but we also must have accountability and efficiency.
We need to know what we spend on intelligence, and we need to know why the
CIA so frequently drops the ball on “intelligence” matters. Otherwise, we
accept an ignorant intelligence that goes thought the motions, spends the
money, and yields only faulty results.