Negroponte To Be New DNI

In a press conference earlier today President Bush nominated current ambassador to Iraq John Negroponte as the nation's first National Intelligence Director. Ambassador Negroponte's main role will be to oversee fifteen of the nation's intelligence agencies, bringing them under one umbrella. Furthermore, Negroponte will also be tasked with delivering the daily security briefing to the president, something that had fallen to the CIA and FBI directors.

From what I've heard Negroponte has always been somewhat of a "ruthless" operator, unaffected by political pressure and risk. This is all fine and dandy, but I'm still skeptical that the creation of this new post will make much of a difference. The 9/11 Commission hailed this as the cure all for the nation's intelligence woes, and many in congress were all to ready to follow every beckoning order from the commission. The intelligence problems that led to our inability to prevent 9/11 were not due to a lack of bureaucracy however, but were a result of institutional walls preventing agencies form communicating with each other and a lack of good human intelligence.

The PATRIOT Act took care of the first problem, the second one still hasn't been addressed. Many of the intelligence cuts that took place during the Clinton years were justified by the rise of greater technologies. Supposedly, satellites and unmanned drones would be able to replace on the ground spies, and it would be a lot less messy. This is flawed however, for satellites and drones can never make up for good human intelligence, they can only compliment it. The intelligence failures that led to 9/11 were a result of the fact that we did not adequately infiltrate al-Qaeda and similar terrorist organizations. Simply adding more bureaucracy and red tape is not going to fix this.

Now maybe I'm just being overly skeptical, and maybe centralizing intelligence will work. I just happen to believe that having all the intelligence brought in by the assorted agencies going through a one man filter isn't all that great of an idea. Fred Barnes, Executive Editor of The Weekly Standard, argued quite persuasively that having the agencies compete for saliency is the best model. That way, intelligence organizations have incentive to seek the most accurate, valuable intelligence, lest they lose the trust and the ear of the president. As is the case with just about everything, competition is the best method of attaining optimum quality.

Simply put, if we want to insure a sound intelligence gathering apparatus in America, than the best road to go down is bringing about more spies and less bureaucracy.