Wider Angle: New Intelligence Report Seeks, Finds Truth

Finally! The government realized what people in the government have been saying for years. The FBI and CIA don't communicate, and neither do the rest of the "intelligence" agencies, and so almost everything falls through the cracks. I believe it is still the case that very few computers in the FBI are powerful enough to access the internet.

The panel, chaired by senior U.S. Appeals Court Judge Laurence H. Silberman and former senator Charles S. Robb (D-Va.), was direct and unsparing in its conclusions, saying the intelligence community was not a community at all but a fragmented collection of rival bureaucracies that were consistently and unfailingly "wrong" on almost every point with regard to Iraq.

Bravo!

More broadly, it said, the intelligence agencies have become obsolete, technologically backward and "increasingly irrelevant" to the new challenges confronting the United States since the end of the Cold War.

Yeah, we have to do crazy shit now. Voicemails, emails, using the internet... and not having our agents outed by journalists. It's always something. (I wish I could include the note of sarcasm, but I cannot.)

[...]

Intelligence collection and analysis will "never be perfect," Bush said. "But in an age where our margin for error is getting smaller, the consequences of underestimating a threat could be tens of thousands of lives."

So, the consequences of underestimating a threat like a memo sent directly to the President stating that Osama Bin Laden is determined to strike the US with airplanes can, apparently, be a massive loss of lives. Go figure.

[...]

"Intelligence will continue to be a critical underpinning for U.S. national security capabilities. As the circumstances in the world continue to evolve, the US intelligence community must have insights into the challenges and continue to strengthen and improve the way intelligence is collected and analyzed."

Another statement from Rumsfeld that is meaningful yet meaningless, timely yet timeless, correct yet not actionable. This quote could be in a statement about the national intelligence (I dare call it a) system in a book. More hot air with absolutely nothing to back it up.