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Mark Steyn, after four months at the Conrad Black trial, points out some shortcomings of our legal system.
Here’s just a random half-dozen reforms the US justice system would benefit from:
1) An end to the near universal reliance on plea bargains, a feature unknown to most other countries in the Common Law tradition. This assures that a convicted man is doubly penalized, first for the crime and second for insisting on his right to trial by jury. The principal casualty of this plea-coppers’ parade is justice itself: for when two men commit the same act but the first is jailed for the rest of his life and dies in prison while the second does six months of golf therapy and community theatre on a British Columbia farm and then resumes his business career, the one thing that can be said with certainty is that such an outcome is unjust. …
John Fund helps us enjoy the prospect of the Sheehan/Pelosi contest.
Gabriel Schoenfeld writes a long one on the CIA for Commentary. One of the most amazing things for Pickerhead to learn over the last decade or so is the amount of bureaucratic rot in the agencies charged with protecting our country. Mr. Schoenfeld takes Tenet’s book and destroys him. We take half of Pickings tonight to see if we can learn how it is that dilettantes and poseurs like Valerie Plame and her husband come to responsible positions in our government.
… For this book’s account of his stormy seven-year term, Tenet has been hammered pitilessly by both Left and Right. In an article in Mother Jones entitled “George Tenet: Loser, Yes. Sycophant, Yes. Fall Guy? Yes,†James Ridgeway thundered that the “slick, self-serving, and stunningly unrepentant Tenet should at best have been fired on September 12, 2001; at worst, he should be in jail. Instead, he has a presidential Medal of Freedom, a best-selling book, and an excuse for everything.†Conservatives and neoconservatives have been no less open-handed with their own denunciations.
Is the contumely deserved? If, as I have suggested, gathering accurate intelligence is an almost insuperable task, the real question is not whether Tenet was a failure by some utopian standard but whether he was better or worse than the norm—and if worse, why. Answering that question requires a look back at the condition of the agency when Tenet came in, and the steps he took or failed to take to address its problems. Much of the evidence can be found in Tenet’s book itself. …
… It was almost by accident, then, that Tenet came to serve at what would turn into one of the most tempestuous moments in American history. The tempests did not blow in all at once. As he recounts in an early chapter, the CIA director was initially absorbed by Clinton’s efforts to negotiate a settlement between Israel and the Palestinians, a process into which the CIA, in a role new to it, had been injected as a broker between the two sides. After innumerable meetings involving various Arab potentates, and exceptionally frustrating sessions with Yasir Arafat, the effort came to naught.
In 1998, however, the focus abruptly changed with attacks on American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and the onset of the era of al-Qaeda sponsored terrorism. By the latter part of that year, writes Tenet, “I was aggressively seeking additional resources from our government to fight terrorism.†But his pleas yielded nothing: “For the most part I succeeded in annoying the administration for which I worked but did not loosen any significant purse strings.†…
… Insofar as Tenet offers a justification for these admitted failures, it is that the roles in which he served—as head of the intelligence community, director of the CIA, and the president’s principal intelligence adviser—“were too much for any one person.†Clearly there is something to that. Whatever one’s view of the CIA’s shortcomings and setbacks during the Tenet years, one cannot put down his book without a feeling of sympathy for him and for the men and women around him who labored to protect us. They cannot be accused of sitting on the sidelines.
But of course one cannot leave things at that. For there are inescapable problems with Tenet’s account, with Tenet himself, and with the agency that he managed. …
… As leader of the CIA, Tenet fought for more resources, more manpower, and better technology. But he never began to address the fundamental problems of the agency either in the age of Clinton or in the age of Bush. Indeed, he was, or became, part of the problem himself. At a juncture of history when the agency’s real, crying need was to penetrate, or at a minimum to study closely the thinking of, adversaries like Iran or North Korea or Iraq—three countries where its coverage and understanding had been chronically inadequate—he now permits himself to boast that he “made it a priority to enhance the agency’s record on diversity†and to have “its workforce reflect a broad cross-section of our population.†In other words, he saw it as the CIA’s most pressing “business need†(his term) to turn its affirmative-action program, at least, into a truly “well-oiled machineâ€â€”albeit one running inside a government bureaucracy now indistinguishable from any other. …
… In a passage that speaks volumes, Tenet then also concedes that the CIA “had devoted little analytic attention to [this issue] prior to September 11,†and was therefore “not initially prepared for the intense focus that the administration put on the Iraq-al Qaeda relationship.†Instead, he offers in apparent extenuation, the agency had been “consumed with the very hot war with Sunni extremists all over the world.â€
This is confounding. A high proportion of those Sunni extremists were Palestinian suicide bombers whose families Saddam Hussein was rewarding. Abu Nidal himself, notwithstanding the secular ideology he came to embrace, was a Sunni. The individuals who carried out the first World Trade Center bombing, one of whom Saddam was sheltering, had been Sunni extremists. Not only were they Sunnis; they were the germ of the al-Qaeda organization. Yet Tenet, as if these dots could not be readily connected, blithely asserts that the CIA, “consumed†with “a very hot war with Sunni extremists all over the world,†did not find it worthwhile to study the relationship with Iraq. Incoherence seldom gets more incoherent than this. …
… In appraising the sorry record of the CIA during George Tenet’s tenure as director it must be recalled that the agency has had its share of previous intelligence failures. The CIA was established in 1947 in large measure to avoid another surprise attack like the one the U.S. had suffered on December 7, 1941 at Pearl Harbor. But only three years after its founding, the fledgling agency missed the outbreak of the Korean war. It then failed to understand that the Chinese would come to the aid of the North Koreans if American forces crossed the Yalu river. It missed the outbreak of the Suez war in 1956. In September 1962, the CIA issued an NIE which stated that the “Soviets would not introduce offensive missiles in Cubaâ€; in short order, the USSR did precisely that. In 1968 it failed to foresee the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia. It gave Richard Nixon scant warning of the Egyptian intention to go to war in October 1973. It did not inform Jimmy Carter that the Soviet Union would invade Afghanistan in 1979. This is only a partial list.
September 11 and the Iraq-WMD fiasco thus come at the long end of an extensive chain. Still, in the lengthy history of American intelligence failures, they are arguably the most damaging: 9/11 because of its sheer human and material cost; the Iraq-WMD fiasco, not only because it contributed to a calculus for war that might have looked different if the equation did not contain the coefficient of a mushroom cloud, but also because of the stain it has left on American credibility at a moment when the integrity of our word is critically important.
Not to be overlooked is the damage done to the essential mission of intelligence itself. In an age of weapons of mass destruction, of an inchoate global suicide cult composed of Hizballah, Hamas, al Qaeda, and a host of other Islamic groupings, of a fanatical Islamist regime in power in Tehran sitting astride the crossroads of Asia and the Middle East, and manifold other short- and long-term challenges to our security, we are now in a position that even when the CIA gets things right, its findings are likely to be greeted with skepticism if not outright dismissal. As a consequence of its failures to give warning when warning was needed, and of its giving warning when warning was not needed, it has become the intelligence agency that cried wolf and is now treated as such. …
If all that isn’t enough to make you ill, try Bob Novak’s column today. It has to do with earmarks and shame corporations that employ senator’s sons. Remember Mark Twain, “There is no native American criminal class, except for congress.” this is not one of Novak’s best efforts, but the facts speak for themselves.
Dilbert has a lesson in keeping ego out of decisions.
I’ve come to call this ego-driven behavior the “loser decision.†I don’t mean it as an insult. It’s an objective fact that life often presents us with choices where the comfortable decision leads nowhere and one that threatens your ego has all the potential in the world.
You need a healthy ego to endure the abuse that comes with any sort of success. The trick is to think of your ego as your goofy best friend who lends moral support but doesn’t know shit.
Has your ego ever driven you off a cliff?