Playing Dumb Intelligence Games with the NSA: Jed Babbin
http://www.epictimes.com/londoncenter/2015/06/playing-dumb-intelligence-games-with-the-nsa/
We don’t know how much damage to national security Rand Paul created by grandstanding his attempt to blockade the NSA’s program that obtained telephone records and analyzed them to spot terrorist connections.
In intelligence, what you know you don’t know – the “known unknowns” – and the what you don’t know that you don’t know – the “unknown unknowns” – are equally dangerous. That’s why our intelligence agencies are always trying to devise new methods of getting the former and identifying and discovering the latter.
We do know that the “USA Freedom Act,” the House bill finally passed by the Senate, takes apart the NSA program in a way that effectively blocks its function. We know that at least one of the phone companies is opting out of the program altogether, that few if any will hold the data for any set period of time and that NSA is going to have to figure out some way to restructure their methods and means of studying telephone data.
For all of Sen. Paul’s constitutional calumnies, we know he lacks a basic understanding of the Constitution and how the courts have interpreted it. As my pal Andy McCarthy pointed out, as a constitutional scholar Rand Paul is a good eye doctor.
But forget Rand Paul for the moment (he actually deserves to be permanently forgotten, but I digress). One of the many things lacking in the Republican race so far is a debate on national security strategy. None – other than Paul – are identifiable as libertarian and isolationist, and it’s probably too much to ask that any of them actually would come up with a cogent plan at this stage of the fundraising race. But they’ll have to do it eventually. Here’s a start.
One part of a national security strategy is a plan to fix what ails our intelligence community.
The question is threefold: first, why our intelligence agencies aren’t getting enough actionable intelligence to prevent terrorist attacks such as the underwear bomber, the shoe bomber and the Fort Hood shooting; second, to what extent our alphabet soup of intelligence agencies (all sixteen of them) aren’t getting enough reliable and actionable intelligence on principal enemies such as Iran as well as on adversaries in the Second Cold War (ongoing but unacknowledged by our government) on nations such as Russia and China; and third, why our CIA and other agencies are using less and less “HUMINT” — good old fashioned spying – the lack of which my sources tell me is an enormous problem.
In short, what is restraining the intelligence community from developing capabilities, cultivating real live spies and thus getting more of the intelligence we need?
Intelligence is a very serious business that is essential to our national security. We need presidential leadership – congress isn’t capable of it — to update and modernize our intel capabilities.
We’ve not had any assessment of our intelligence communities since shortly after 9-11, almost fourteen years ago. Then, congress “reformed” the intel community in two ways. First, the Department of Homeland Security was created and put in charge of analyzing – not gathering – intel about terrorism within the United States. The FBI was supposed to partner with DHS. We know – from the recent revelations that DHS doesn’t even get the full list of people linked to terrorism – that the FBI and other agencies aren’t playing well with others. This is the kind of failure to “connect the dots” that led the 9-11 hijackers to succeed.
The second intel overhaul was in the creation of the office of the Director of National Intelligence, which has proved to be a pretty useless layer of bureaucracy. The Defense Intelligence Agency, seeing the failure of the CIA to gather the right kind of actionable intelligence, has tried to fill the gaps, but they don’t often play well with others any more than the FBI does.
Political pressure has, I’m told by multiple sources, pushed the CIA away from HUMINT. They’ve almost gone back to the Carter (Jimmy, not Ashton) days when CIA Director Stansfield Turner decided that we’d use spy satellites exclusively because spies are nasty people, and – heaven knows – we can’t afford to get our hands dirtied by dealing with them.
But spy satellites can’t do what spies can, and they’re kinda costly. They typically cost upwards of $1 billion and cost another $200-$300 million to launch. Not to mention the fact that the CIA’s launch services contractors are being barred from purchasing Russian rocket motors (which we don’t manufacture ourselves, and which we’re inanely dependent on for the Atlas V rocket) of which there are only a couple of years’ supply left. But don’t worry your pretty little head over that. One of Obama’s chief fundraisers – PayPal billionaire Elon Musk – is not only building battery-powered cars, but is also testing cheaper launch vehicles. Which may or may not be ready to take over when they’re needed.
So much time has passed since 9-11, and so many difficulties have been encountered, that we need to figure out what’s broken and fix what isn’t rather than invent problems to propel Rand Paul’s presidential campaign. From those facts, it’s pretty obvious that the intelligence agencies need a serious, bottom-to-top analysis of what our intelligence agencies need to get the job done.
We know we’re not getting adequate intelligence on many fronts, including ISIS and Iran to Russia and China. We know, from what NSA Director Adm. Mike Rogers – head of Cyber Command – said a few weeks ago that our cyberwar capabilities are having zero deterrent effect on foreign intelligence agencies’ efforts to penetrate our most closely-guarded defense and intelligence cyber networks. All of those things have to be addressed.
It would take a significant amount of time – our most valuable asset – to perform such a bottom-up review of all intelligence activities. A new president could order one on his first day in office. And the best we can hope for at this stage is for some prospective candidate to promise that he (or she) would order one right away.
Who will play the role of a grownup and promise one?
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