Wanted: Competent Big Brothers

Why isn’t a more fundamental rethinking going on? Here we arrive at the real issue. Giorgio, the former NSA codebreaker, says that the problem of tracking terrorists needs to be rethought from the ground up "in small bits." The government needs to bring in the best and brightest entrepreneurs (interestingly, Poindexter’s seemingly wacky futures market might have done something like this). And the vested interests of America’s various cold-war-era agencies, and their traditional big contractors, are preventing this from happening. The late, great economist Mancur Olson once described how the accumulation of vested interest groups and bureaucracies in free societies causes a kind of sclerosis in the system over many decades. This is precisely what is holding up intelligence reform today, and Olson, who died in 1998 at a time he was seen as a future Nobel laureate, would no doubt recognize the phenomenon.

Some observers have noted that in World War II and the early cold war, America built the intelligence apparatus it needed to win from scratch. Why did it seem so easier then than today? they ask. In part because on the eve of World War II, the U.S. government bureaucracy was tiny, especially the military (the Interior Department was bigger than the War Department, believe it or not).

Today, by contrast, every intelligence agency is a glandular monstrosity left over from a half century of world war and cold war. The FBI, CIA, NSA and other agencies spend most of their energy defending their own turf, rather than American turf. "The bottom line here is entire system has been built up incrementally over 50 years as part of what Eisenhower warned about, the military-industrial complex," says Steele. "The system is on automatic pilot." Ed Giorgio agrees. "There are sacred cows, enormously expensive endeavors costing billions year, being done in space and elsewhere," says Giorgio. "You’re not going to find a terrorist by looking for one in space."

Only one person has the power to slice through the bureaucratic inertia and set real reform in motion: the president of the United States. But to do so, of course, could put the permanent war in jeopardy. And if you’re a "war president," as Bush describes himself, and you want to reassert presidential power, as he does, then permanent war can be a good thing. Perhaps that is why Karl Rove, with his war-works-for-the-GOP campaign strategy for 2006, looks so happy these days. Perhaps it is why the president--who once dismissed Osama bin Laden as unimportant as he diverted the nation’s attention and resources to Iraq--now says that Americans should take the mastermind of 9/11 "seriously." (Wasn’t it just Groundhog Day recently?) Perhaps it is why the Bush administration is now devoting so much to its military buildup while stripping critical education programs needed to make America more competitive, insisting on permanent tax cuts and ensuring monster deficits for decades.

Wait a minute. Drawing the lone superpower into an endless global struggle, draining it of its wealth and will ... that was Osama bin Laden’s strategic goal, right? Didn’t we have some intelligence on that once?

© 2006