The squeegee crew in Congress is working overtime since weapons inspector David Kay dropped some blockbuster testimony on Congress. Democrats have been blood-letting while Republicans have been gathering Band-Aids and Bactine to staunch the flow. Hopefully, the cleaning crew gets hazardous duty pay.
Kay reported he wasn't convinced that Iraq had WMD stashed in a spider hole. Quite the opposite: Kay now believes that Iraq never had the WMD we said they did. After he spoke those words, it didn't matter what he said next. David Kay became the white ball in a game of political Pong.
While the political factions are busy roasting this turkey, the undercooked part is what really begs for attention. Kay stated clearly he thought the CIA was to blame, and he's not the only one to say so.
American intelligence-gathering has been suspect for years now. The most massive failure was inability to predict the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. That failure's sordid details were documented in 2002 when Washington Times reporter Bill Gertz published "Breakdown."
In it, Gertz paints an unflattering picture that would make even Robert Mapplethorpe squirm. He reports that the CIA is basically operationally ineffective as it has become a bureaucracy and is no longer a lean, mean intelligence-gathering machine.
The prime failure has been the leadership. The CIA has had a series of directors who were political appointees who didn't know item No. 1 about the intelligence world.
Jimmy Carter's appointee, Adm. Stansfield Turner, slashed 820 people from the Operations Directorate, the arm responsible for gathering intelligence. Nobody's been able to rebuild it since. The 1990s brought another series of ruinous appointments, chief among them John Deutch.
Deutch is now infamous for the so-called "Deutch Rules." The guidelines severely restricted recruiting new agents and informants who had questionable or criminal pasts because the CIA didn't want the bad press. While crushing recruitment, Deutch also cut around 1,000 agents, including several Middle East sources.
Several sources told Gertz that the CIA is now flying on the intelligence foreign services gather since it is not gathering the needed human intelligence. Those sources indicate that the CIA has no way of effectively responding to the new terror threat with the current system in place.
Under the current leadership, that is not likely to change. The current director, George Tenet, was one of Deutch's prot+â-¬g+â-¬s and is considered a highly political director.
And these examples are only the warm-up. Gertz goes into much more detail on not only the CIA, but also the FBI, National Security Agency, Defense Intelligence Agency and Congress for their failures and cites multiple cases as evidence. The underwhelming conclusion is that the American intelligence community has been failing for decades.
That makes the new failures surrounding Iraq one more nail in the coffin. Gertz points out that John Walker Lindh, a disaffected American teenager, was able to join the Taliban, but the CIA can't get a source inside al-Qaeda.
That's simply pathetic.
Kay's report has led to calls for a commission investigation to where the intelligence failed. They ought to scrap the commission and read Gertz's book instead. It would save millions, and Gertz charts a course for revitalizing American intelligence operations. The sooner the intelligence gets fixed, the sooner we can stop flying blind.
Write to Jeff at mannedarena@yahoo.comRead More
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