Third Party Watchblog
bq. At best, I can only conclude that our government was a mess regarding national security. And like any large beauracracy that changes leaders every 4 to 8 years, our government’s ability to plan long term, implement and fulfill long term projects, and remain consistently focused on priorities such that national security remains always the highest priority, is simply not built into our democratic system as it exists today. Partisan politics, money interests, high priced entrance fees for lobbyists influencing policy, and polls and media spin have all taken their toll on our government’s ability to do its first and most important task, national security, with any degree of competence.
I still think that it’s hard to fault the intelligence community considering the variety of threats and rumors and other items out there every day. Is government intelligence a big bureaucracy? Yes. If it was the most efficient, leanly run machine in the world would it be perfect? No.
There’s a tendency to want to blame somebody or something when things go wrong. In normal life we accept the idea of fallible human beings. With governmental actions, however it seems to always be a process failure, or somebody’s failure to act.
Obviously the FBI, CIA, etc. can do a better job in the future. Are we now willing to possibly trade individual privacies for more intelligence and security? It seems so.
The biggest concern I have with the 9/11 Commission however, is that it’s become a political blame game. It doesn’t seem to be trying to improve future security, merely assign partisan blame for failures in the past.
9/11 Intel Failure?
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Third Party Watchblog
bq. At best, I can only conclude that our government was a mess regarding national security. And like any large beauracracy that changes leaders every 4 to 8 years, our government’s ability to plan long term, implement and fulfill long term projects, and remain consistently focused on priorities such that national security remains always the highest priority, is simply not built into our democratic system as it exists today. Partisan politics, money interests, high priced entrance fees for lobbyists influencing policy, and polls and media spin have all taken their toll on our government’s ability to do its first and most important task, national security, with any degree of competence.
I still think that it’s hard to fault the intelligence community considering the variety of threats and rumors and other items out there every day. Is government intelligence a big bureaucracy? Yes. If it was the most efficient, leanly run machine in the world would it be perfect? No.
There’s a tendency to want to blame somebody or something when things go wrong. In normal life we accept the idea of fallible human beings. With governmental actions, however it seems to always be a process failure, or somebody’s failure to act.
Obviously the FBI, CIA, etc. can do a better job in the future. Are we now willing to possibly trade individual privacies for more intelligence and security? It seems so.
The biggest concern I have with the 9/11 Commission however, is that it’s become a political blame game. It doesn’t seem to be trying to improve future security, merely assign partisan blame for failures in the past.