Robert Kaplan talks about intelligence in his book Warrior Politics....
From Sun-Tzu we learn that "[F]oreknowledge cannot be had from ghosts and spirits...It must come from people who know the enemy's situation." Kaplan says: "A society like our own, which often heaps scorn on espionage and thus fails to attract its best people to the intelligence profession, is a society destined to stumble periodically into unnecessary wars." Could September 11 have been avoided had our intelligence agencies not been reduced over the past decades by Democrats in Congress and a scornful liberal media, to risk-averse, chair-bound, blind-folded bureaucrats?
There has to be oversight of such a powerful agency, of course, but the foolish liberals decided that any faults in it meant they should get rid of it! Or hamstring it, which is what they did. Hopefully, that is changing now.