The Intelligence Chief and Why I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Stupidity
Okay. By now everyone has finally figured out that the CIA dropped the ball. By now everyone has figured out that every intelligence agency dropped the ball. They were guilty of groupthink, a process where everyone believes the same thing, so that all of their conclusions will end up sustantiating incorrect information.

So, the solution from the Kerry campaign has been to create a central intelligence cabinet position to oversee all intelligence. Bush's response is akin to "yeah, what he said." Now, all partisanship aside, this is the stupidest thing to come out of Washington since...well, pick anything because lots of stupid things have come from Washington. Are they even thinking anymore? Or is politics the ONLY rationalization?

Think about it for a second. The problem as accepted by everyone is that the CIA got it wrong and orchestrated the wrong information to the president. Explain to me exactly how having one person, working for the president, or working for God, or working for Elmo, is going to make this any better. The problem would be increased even further because now we don't have groupthink. We have dogmatic interpretation by one office, deciding for everyone, which helps groupthink but makes it happen much faster.

The solution is to make intelligence agencies even more autonomous, but to make communication between them much more accessible to those agencies. Otherwise, the next war (and yes, there will be a next war) will be decided on even flimsier standards than this last one was.

Stumble It!