August 9, 2004

MEMORANDUM TO: OPINION LEADERS

FROM: GARY SCHMITT

SUBJECT: The 9/11 Commission & Intelligence Reform

As Congress begins to examine the recommendations of the 9-11 Commission, it is essential that members keep in mind the core problems in intelligence collection and analysis identified by the commission - and by Congress in previous reports - and ask themselves whether the recommendations being put forward usefully address those concerns. In this connection, I want to draw your attention to Reuel Gerecht's article ("Not Worth a Blue Ribbon: The Conventional (and Unhelpful) Wisdom of the 9/11 Commission.") in the current edition of the Weekly Standard. (The article can be found online at www.weeklystandard.com). Among the highlights:

"Operationally, the commission's report simply does not address the principal problem of America's intelligence effort against Islamic extremism - the failure of the CIA to develop a clandestine service with a methodology and officers capable of penetrating the Islamic holy-warrior organizations in Europe, the Middle East, and elsewhere. And analytically, the report's bureaucratic recommendations are unlikely to improve the quality of the U.S. government's thinking about counterterrorism - indeed, they could make intelligence analysis more monochromatic and defined by groupthink than it already is."

Moreover, "the report fails to tackle seriously the overarching policy lesson from 9/11 - the need to strike first…. The stark gravity of this theme, and the general merit of the narrative - which is well written, incisive, and politically damning (vastly more so of the Clintonites' eight years than of the Bushies' eight months) - make the conventional and sometimes sophomoric quality of the recommendations that follow all the more off-putting."

"Undeterred, the commission would have us create a big intelligence bureaucracy associated with its new director. Count on it: The ethos that would develop under him would be no more competitive than it was collegial. Differing opinions within America's intelligence community would tend to become fewer, not more, as a new bureaucratic spirit radiated downward from the man who controlled all the purse strings and wrote the performance reports of the most important players in the intelligence community. American intelligence could well become more focused on the bureaucratic gaming that would be intense as the new structure solidified. It is hard to see how the quality of American intelligence analysis would improve through this reorganization…. But trying to do to intelligence gathering and analysis what General Motors did to car production isn't the way to make American counterterrorism more effective."