Rush to Czardom

The 9/11 Commissioners have performed a useful function by describing some of the policy failures that allowed the al Qaeda attacks of 2001. Now if they really want to do us all another favor, they'll remove themselves to an undisclosed location until, say, November 2. We jest, but only slightly. The Commissioners are not the people's elected representatives, after all. Nor were they ever intended to become a group of unaccountable policy ombudsmen following the publication of their report.

For example, how much budget authority should such a director have over various parts of the intelligence community? On the one hand, we'd obviously want to prevent him from becoming another toothless "czar." On the other hand, we don't want to be fixing things that ain't broke. The vast majority of the intelligence budget is in the Pentagon, where it has lately been used with great success to transform the nature of warfare in Afghanistan and then Iraq. Any reform must protect this growing coordination between actionable intelligence and commanders on the battlefield. Having the Pentagon's Undersecretary for Intelligence report to someone other than the Secretary of Defense, therefore, seems to be a mistake.

We think Mr. Bush was right to suggest that the intelligence director should have budget input but not total control. Yet he was all but accused of heresy on Monday for appearing to differ with 9/11 Commissioners on the issue, which suggests to us that the time isn't right for a reasoned debate. The model for the intelligence reform process should be the careful deliberation that preceded the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Defense Reorganization Act, which created the structure of our current Armed Forces under the Joint Staff.

"True, I created the very conditions that led to the 911 Atrocities.
True, we covered up my, and the Clintons', roles.
True, we also destroyed all the evidence and each and every CODE-level copy including all margin notes.
However, now, we are exonerated.
We declare ourselves Czars of American Security with full CODE-, COSMIC-, and &^%$-level security
to continue in perpetuity to our children or whom we assign.
When President Kerry and our lawyers finally take control,
we shall be appointed to run both the Justice and the State Dept.
So move along you stupid people before I personally sic my IRS on you.
You have been long-warned that you ought to have stayed out of our business"

CONCLUSION:

"More broadly, it would be a great mistake to interpret the need for intelligence reform as the only, or even the most important, lesson of 9/11. True, the CIA had failed to establish human sources inside al Qaeda, but nobody seriously believes a different command structure alone would have changed that. For that matter, we know that the intelligence community was functioning well enough to offer the Clinton Administration a number of opportunities to kill Osama bin Laden, which were always scrubbed due to legal concerns.

"The obvious implication of so much of the 9/11 Commission's report is that the real failing of the Clinton and pre-9/11 Bush Administrations wasn't so much one of intelligence but of mindset. Neither was committed enough to acting pre-emptively against our enemies, and to doing so without legal restrictions (such as the Ford-era executive order banning assassinations) that were imposed starting in the anti-CIA heyday of the 1970s.

"The post-9/11 Bush Administration has already done a lot to solve those problems by declaring a war on terror and passing the Patriot Act. But acknowledging as much explicitly was never in the cards for hyper-partisan Democratic Commissioners Jamie Gorelick and Richard Ben-Veniste. It didn't help either that Ms. Gorelick was an important legal officer in the Clinton terror fight, and had an obvious conflict of interest. Or that A-teamers such as Henry Kissinger were hounded off the Commission for lesser reasons before it ever got started.

"So while the Commission's recommendations deserve a careful hearing, they should hardly be considered as bureaucratic holy writ. Many of their recommendations are reasonable, as far as they go. But they are only one of several groups whose proposals warrant attention, including the Chuck Robb-Laurence Silberman intelligence review panel that won't report until next March.

"We hope the Members of Congress aren't stampeded -- either by the Commission's media-lobbying or Mr. Kerry's political opportunism -- to whip through legislation just so they can claim to have done something by Election Day. That would be a vote for making themselves safer, not America."

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