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Intelligence And US Army Veteran
Frank Naif .. September 30, 2008

Obama Efforts To Reform Intelligence May Be Hampered By Clinton Legacy; McCain Offers Extension Of Bush Approach

Read More: Barack Obama 2008, Central Intelligence Agency, Department Of Homeland Security, Intelligence Community, Intelligence Policy, Intelligence Privatization, John McCain 2008, Home News .. [each linked inside] ..

An Obama or McCain administration will face serious challenges in reining in the mess that is US intelligence policy. For all the trouble that intelligence policy has caused for both Democrats and Republicans over the past two decades, it has been all but invisible in these final months of the 2008 election campaign as events have sucked the oxygen out of substantive election coverage. The Republican's stunt-casting of Sarah Palin effectively stymied meaningful policy discussion for a few weeks. The financial meltdown has steered the conversation back to substance, but we're still not talking about America's wars, terrorism, or our country's first line of defense--intelligence.

What's at stake for Americans outside of the beltway and the vast national security complex? Foremost, the safety and security of the nation. Intelligence failed on 9-11, and failed again in the run-up to the Iraq war. Good intelligence, or at least better intelligence than what we have, will save the country in the long run. American prestige in the world is disproportionately impacted by US intelligence misdeeds and mistakes. For example, most Americans do not know the name Maher Arar--but most Canadians do. Arar, a dual citizen of Canada and Syria, was arrested by US authorities .. http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/time100/article/0,28804,1595326_1615754_1616006,00.html .. at JFK Airport in 2002 and "rendered" by the US government to Syrian intelligence for a year or so of torture and beatings. He was found to have no terrorist ties by the Canadian government and awarded a Canadian $10 million settlement. The Bush Administration has yet to clear Arar's name. Canadians I know are bitter about the Arar case, and a few won't even come to the US for famiiy events--out of fear.

Obama and McCain agree that there are problems in intelligence, but they differ radically on what the problems are. Obama appears to be concerned with the negative impact of recent US intelligence developments on national life and the foreign view of the US. McCain believes that US intelligence needs to be reorganized and, in fact, subject to fewer restrictions to become more effective.

The Obama national security team boasts an impressive pedigree and acknowledges problems in the intelligence community. Unfortunately, Obama's intelligence picks are likely to perceived as throwbacks to the Clinton era, which much of the intelligence community regards as a kind of wilderness era of shrinking budgets and declining influence.

By assuming the cheerleader role for all things national security, the McCain team's predictable, conservative criticism of intelligence policy does not sugges a break from Bush intelligence policy. Nonetheless, McCain could be in a position to parlay his image as a national security heavy to effect reform of key policies and organizations, but his team is larded with many neocons who would not likely deviate from Bush policies.

The State of Intelligence Policy: Expanding, Every Which Way . . .

Most Americans are vaguely aware that the mission and size of the U.S. intelligence community--that collection of a few dozen Federal agencies, including CIA, NSA, and FBI, charged with intelligence and covert action--has changed in the past seven years. What many Americans don't realize is how expansive this change is:

* More government organizations are involved in intelligence operations: Spy satellites, networks of foreign informants, and electronic eavesdropping collecting information on foreign targets were at the core of US intelligence activity until 2001. Federal law enforcement's role in intelligence has expanded, but even more dramatically, state and local law enforcement units are now playing a role in intelligence through Federally-funded "Fusion Centers" and "Joint Terrorism Task Forces." Another quiet expansion of the intelligence and national security complex has taken place in academia, with universities nationwide accepting intelligence funds and adding intelligence and homeland security curriculum to their offerings and their research portfolios.

* More Intelligence Actvity at Home: As to domestic intelligence activities, NSA is apparently eavesdropping on US phone conversations. The Federal government itself has inadvertently divulged its domestic wiretap and eavesdropping activity in litigation over terrorist financing and to American journalists. And even if intelligence agencies aren't directly involved in collecting intelligence from Americans, Federal agencies like Customs and Border Patrol are undoubtedly sharing with US Intelligence information they collect from Americans (such as data from travelers' laptops collected by Customs agents). Department of Defense has also expanded its domestic intelligence operations, forming a new unit, the Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA), and building vast databases on American citizen activity since 2001.

* Declining Standards in Intelligence Operations: The range or repertoire of intelligence activity has also expanded to include formerly taboo operations and techniques. When I entered into duty as a CIA analyst in the early nineties, I vividly remember receiving a briefing on lawful conduct that singled out assassination, extrajudicial detention, torture, domestic intelligence activities, and a host of other misdeeds as unequivocally illegal. "If you're ever directed to participate in such activity," explained a CIA lawyer to my class of new employees, "you must resist participation and report the activity to CIA General Counsel as soon as practicable." A Google news search will show that US intelligence is now assassinating (via armed Predator drones), kidnapping (CIA officers are currently on trial for kidnapping in Italy; there are other cases), and torturing (at so-called "black site" prisons in the MIddle East and Eastern Europe).

. . . Intelligence Outsourcing Every Which Way . . .

Meanwhile, the senior leadership of the Intelligence Community have embarked on a radical privatization scheme that has received little or no scrutiny from Congress, oversight agencies, or non-governmental watchdog groups. This privatization started during the Clinton administration, but has come into full bloom during the Bush administration. Several investigative reporters, most notably Tim Shorrock in his excellent Spies For Hire, have extensively documented this phenomena. Essentially, the taxpayer is paying twice for the expansion of US intelligence--not only have intelligence missions expanded to more locations with more personnel and infrastructure (which costs--a lot), the intelligence community is relying on a small stable of intelligence contractors who take a profit from the expansion (who charge more per employee and cost more for the government to manage).

It's an enviable business model for companies like SAIC, CACI, and Booz-Allen and Hamilton, whose clients (the Intelligence Community) act as a sort of "farm team" that trains and imparts unique qualifications on federal employees so these contractors can hire them and bill them back to the government for hundreds of dollars per hour. Although these intelligence contractors fancy themselves as participating in a free and open marketplace, they might as well be parastatal or semi-public companies right out of a totalitarian economy: they are a tiny cabal that depends solely on public funds and sells services that only the government can, or would want to buy.

These contractors are not just wasting taxpayer money--they participate in a corruptible, if not already corrupt process. Intelligence insiders that I know agree: Shorrock and other outsiders only scratch the surface of how deeply outsourcing has impacted US intelligence capabilities. For example, senior intelligence officials already rely on contractors for much of the scut work and policy wonkery needed to manage resources, contracts, and outsourcing. That's a little bit like letting a used car salesman decide if you should buy a used car. In an August conference call with journalists to discuss "human capital," senior DNI officials indicated that they have been analyzing their own outsourcing, but also confessed that there's little that they really know or understand about their reliance on contractors, especially for management and administration.

If this seems like inside baseball, consider this: the Iraqi government last year temporarily froze the activities within Iraq of the US security contractor Blackwater Worldwide, after a contentious shooting incident in Baghdad that left 17 Iraqi civilians dead. The freeze effectively paralyzed the CIA station in Baghdad, according to PajamasMedia and RJ Hillhouse, on her blog The Spy Who Billed Me. Indeed, Hillhouse suggests that the Iraqi government's objective in singling out Blackwater was to stymie CIA activity in Iraq. If that's true, then shame on the leadership of the intelligence community for letting one highly visible contractor jeopardize their critical Iraq field activities.

. . . Dwindling Morale, Scarce Successes

The record of US intelligence policy over the past 16 years speaks for itself, which is to say, replete with failures and blown opportunities. The crowning failure, of course, is the surprise of the 9-11 attacks. To the extent there were prior indications of the attacks, intelligence bureaucracy and policymakers failed to take actions that could have prevented the attacks or mitigated their effects. The decade or so before the attacks witnessed numerous occasions where diplomacy or covert action could have neutralized or rolled back the influence of Bin Laden and his associates. During the same period, US intelligence was taken off guard by several notable weapons of mass destruction incidents, particularly nuclear tests carried out by India and Pakistan, as well as the unmasking of several major spies right here in Washington.

In the wake of 9-11, the intelligence community has suffered an embarrassing richness of embarrassments. Analysts turned out to be completely wrong about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. The reorganization of the intelligence community under the new Director of National Intelligence, as well as the shift to outsourcing, has created a a constant state of flux that has severely hurt morale and diminished a formerly proud tradition of carefully cultivated institutional expertise. And lest we forget, US intelligence hasn't caught up with Bin Laden or his pal Zawahiri, despite a botched campaign of extrajudicial detention, torture, and killer robot airplanes. Backstage, as it were, policymakers and senior intelligence officials have put intelligence officers and vital sources and methods at risk by failing to tidy up the un-sexy lawyering and diplomacy needed to backstop day-to-day intelligence operations. As a result, US intelligence officers are now advised to purchase their own professional liability insurance to cover legal costs--you know, in case senior intelligence officials and policymakers are too chicken-hearted to stand up and say, "Yeah, I ordered this fine American to break the law to protect the nation. I take full responsibility."

How A New Administration Could Make A Difference

An Obama or McCain administration will face serious challenges in reining in the mess that is US intelligence policy. Neither campaign explicitly lays out a comprehensive proposal for intelligence policy, though there are important indications of how that policy is likely to take shape.

Three elements in Obama's Blueprint for Change stand out as important indications of the direction his administration's intelligence policy would be likely to take. Obama has pledged, for example, to end the culture of secrecy. Another key point in the Obama Blueprint is cracking down on sole-source and related sweetheart government contracting arrangements--a key factor in how classified intelligence contracting has exploded with little or no oversight. He has also pledged to renew US diplomacy. All three of these initiatives could do much to shed light on the rationale and extent of the expansion of US intelligence, particularly into domestic American life. Renewing US diplomacy could also reinvigorate cooperation between US intelligence and law enforcement and foreign counterparts--a vital element in building a comprehensive global strategy to combat terrorrism. Disengagement from Iraq and closure of Guantanamo, two other key Obama policy points, will also help strengthen cooperation with allied governments in the fights against terrorism and nuclear proliferation.

The national security page of McCain's web site promises to "shore up alliances" and "use all the instruments of national power" to fight terrorism. McCain also claims to understand "that to impinge on the rights of our own citizens or restrict the freedoms for which our nation stands would be to give terrorists the victory they seek." To achieve these goals, the McCain team recently proposed that the answer to US intelligence woes is creation of yet another new intelligence agency, this time a latter-day Office of Strategic Services, or OSS, the WWII-era forerunner of CIA. This proposal takes aim at the allegedly "risk-averse" CIA. "Risk averse" in this context really means "insufficiently committed to politicizing intelligence in favor of the neocon worldview." In short, the McCain view of problems with the intelligence community is at odds with the Obama view. Where Obama sees a "culture of secrecy" that needs to be fixed, McCain sees a culture of fact-based reality that needs to be steered back to the conservative message.

The intelligence advisers of both campaigns are another study in contrasts--and similarities. The McCain team of intelligence advisers reads like a who's who of discredited pro-Bush neocons, most notably Randy Scheunemann and James Woolsey. Woolsey, a former DCI from the first Clinton administration, was unpopular in CIA hallways back then. As an early adopter of the "Iraq did 9-11" mantra, Woolsey would likely be poorly received were he and his associates to assume new intelligence leadership responsibilities. While McCain's neocons may be wrong about nearly everything, they could bring leadership and bureaucratic acumen to the management of intelligence. But I doubt it: their proposed new intelligence agency would likely cause even more bureaucratic infighting and further diminish already flagging morale in the spy ranks.

Meanwhile, Obama's team includes an impressive array of intelligence and policymaker veterans like former Clinton NSCer Rand Beers and former CIA Deputy Director John McLaughlin. Memories are long inside those secret vaults, and Obama's team could be hampered by old memories of the Clinton era. For many in the intelligence community, the Clinton era was a dismal time of budget cuts, diminishing capabilities, and waning influence. President Clinton, for example, rarely requested CIA intelligence briefings, and CIA field operations were severely downsized during his administration.

The Bottom Line

The Obama campaign seems to be interested in fixing US intelligence, but may find itself fighting Clinton-era battles as intelligence agencies perceive that they are being marginalized or lowered in priority. McCain's campaign has clearly indicated that it believes US intelligence is not sufficiently aggressive, despite the most dramatic upswing in overall activity and new initiatives since the high Cold War years. Regardless of who wins the election, the men and women who live and work in secret could see their work transform radically in the coming administration. But it's unlikely that continuation of current policies--or even more cavalier intelligence policy--will make America safer or more highly regarded overseas.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/frank-naif/obama-mccain-and-the-inte_b_130571.html