The one constant in American history is that government bureaucracies grow and proliferate rather than shrink and dwindle. Despite its secrecy — or perhaps because of it — the intelligence community is no exception. After 9/11, changing over to fight against small, nimble terrorist groups, instead of the massive, ossified bureaucracies of communist countries, was …
Continue reading “Proliferation Intelligence or Proliferation of Intelligence?”
Intelligence is like statistics. Both can be manipulated to tell you anything you want to hear, and you seldom get the real story from either one. But there is one major difference between intelligence and statistics: we didn’t spend $80 billion on statistics last year. Our government announced on Thursday that it has spent $80.1 …
Continue reading “$80 Billion Down the Plumbing”
Listen to Ron Paul deliver these remarks here. I have often spoken about the excessive size of government, and most recently how waste and inefficiency needs to be eliminated from our military budget. Our foreign policy is not only bankrupting us, but actively creating and antagonizing enemies of the United States and compromising our national …
Continue reading “On the Bloated Intelligence Bureaucracy”
The sacking of Dennis Blair, the third director of national intelligence in the position’s short five-year history, is one important indicator that the Intelligence Reform and Terrorist Prevention Act of 2004 has failed. That act was effective neither in achieving real reform of the sprawling intelligence bureaucracies nor in preventing terrorist attacks. In fact, Blair’s …
Continue reading “Intelligence Reform Is a Failure”
Part I noted that two key requirements of our counterinsurgency doctrine – a legitimate host-nation government and a competent, trustworthy host-nation security force – will never be accomplished in Iraq or Afghanistan. Part II will illustrate the lack of reliable intelligence in our woebegone wars. The counterintelligence field manual that Gen. David Petraeus supposedly wrote …
Continue reading “The COIN Myth, Part II”
As intelligence agencies rush to connect more dots on a page so crowded with dots that they already almost touch, Americans need to focus on the real problem, our foreign policies. We have made ourselves the enemy of over a billion people, nearly a quarter of the world’s population. Aside from President Obama’s Bush-sounding, bombastic …
Continue reading “Too Many Dots, Too Many Enemies”
After the CIA-led fiasco at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961, President John Kennedy was quoted as saying he wanted to "splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds." I can understand his anger, but a thousand is probably too many. Better is a Solomon solution; divide the CIA …
Continue reading “Break the CIA in Two”
Ray McGovern on fudging the intel
The ‘I’ is for intelligence, not intervention, says Philip Giraldi
