Monday, August 23, 2004

Sneak Attack: It reveals something that the GOP plan for revamping the intelligence community wasn't passed through the White House before being made public. Sen. Pat Roberts knew his plan would have been killed, so his only chance to make it work would be to go to the public first.

I can imagine that Bush isn't too please. Kerry, of course, continues his pattern of loudly advocating any proposed policy change before even reading it.

As for the proposal itself, I don't see any particular reason why it would improve things. I'm not an intelligence expert, but from what I do know, putting more intelligence gatherers under one roof wouldn't make the agencies more credible. It would only make for a more obvious fall guy when things go wrong. And even though the military's intelligence agencies screwed up royally, I don't think they should be punished by removing almost all their power.

We've had two tremendous screw ups lately -- the 9/11 attacks and the missing WMD. I'm sure the organization and the coordination between the agencies contributed to the screw ups. But the biggest problem was that we didn't have enough intelligence gatherers in the Middle East infiltrating terrorist groups and dictatorial regimes.

I'm not sure how one goes about doing such deeds. But until that is taken care of, the rest of the rearranging the deck chairs is merely an academic exercise.