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Monday, April 11, 2005

Intelligence reform Mark Steyn-style 

As always, you can't go wrong:

"Even before the latest budget-bloating 'reforms,' the U.S. government was spending $30 billion annually on intelligence, and in return its intelligence agencies got everything wrong. British and French intelligence also get a lot of things wrong, but they get them wrong on far smaller budgets. One of the great sub-plots of the post-9/11 world is the uselessness of 'experts,' the guys who get unlimited budgets to run 24/7 agencies devoted to their areas of expertise. What's startling about the glimpses we get of CIA operations -- that red-hot presidential briefing from August 2001, Joseph C. Wilson IV's non-fact-finding mission to Niger -- is how generalized it all is: Anybody who watches cable news or reads an occasional foreign paper would know as much.

"How about if that $30 billion was allocated to, say, a program for subsidized bicycling helmets for grade-schoolers or some other federal boondoggle, and they bulldozed Langley, and gave the CIA director 20,000 bucks to put all his agency's global 'analysis' up on a blog -- spook.com -- and invite comments from readers around the world? It couldn't possibly be less informed than the CIA's decades-long record of incompetence in the Middle East."
Actually, I can think of a few existing blogs which have rather good track record.

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