From: (WalterM140)

the intellgence community is in a shambles,

Bush certainly deserves some blame for that, but the real problem set in long
ago, during the Carter administration, with the "Hallowe'en Massacre" under
Carter's CIA chief Stansfield Turner. He executed a purge of almost 3,000
intelligence officers, some 2,000 of them covert agents and paramilitary
specialists. Since then, the CIA has been gelded, involved mostly in
intelligence gathering and analysis.
We really do need a thorough examination of our intelligence services
effectiveness and then decide what we want them to do. A powerful covert
operations program in the OSS/early CIA mode (think Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy;
you know, _real_ Democrats), although anathema to the far left, might be just
what we need in the kind of war we find ourselves in today: Let the damned
terrorists and terrorist-supporting nations be afraid of _our_ terrorists, who
should be a million times better trained, equipped and supported than theirs
ever could be.
We've had an intelligence disaster brewing since Carter (actually probably from
Ford) and we really need to take a look at what we are doing. We used to be
pretty good at influencing foreign events without outright invasions, getting
rid of foreign leaders we didn't like, fomenting coups...whatever it took, from
Iran to Chile. But then we decided that was A Bad Thing. So now, the only
option we have when we want a regime change is a full-scale military invasion,
from Panama to Iraq.
We need to rethink this. That doesn't mean we should just go back to what we
did before with the CIA, et al. We made some stupid mistakes then, from Greece
to the Bay of Pigs. We know what they were and why they happened. We ought to
be able to do it better this time around. In any case, we need a wider range
of options, and greater latitude to act pre-emptively when we see a bad
situation developing.


Chris Mark