The folly of relying on the "experts" who are responsible for the National Intelligence Estimate regarding Iran and its nuclear program is again on view. The Principle Deputy Director of National Intelligence, who was integral to the findings of that report and its publication, and who has been defending it from criticism across the political spectrum and around the world (save for Iran, Russia, and China, which reveals a lot about the shoddiness of the NIE report), last week addressed the need to reform our intelligence agencies. Commentary has a priceless analysis by Gabriel Schoenfeld: On December 6, Donald Kerr, the PDDNI, that is, the Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence, laid out his agency's 500-day plan to set things right. "What is required, first and foremost," he said in congressional testimony, "is integrating the foundational elements and removing the barriers - in the areas of policy, management/budgeting, technology and acquisition, information, collection and analysis, and culture." To this end, we need "to promote and build an intelligence community (IC) identity or sense of ‘jointness' by creating programs that provide for cross-agency work assignments and training."
The 500-day plan enters almost immediately into a discussion of the vital importance of "Equal Opportunity and Diversity." It offers high praise for the intelligence community's Diversity Strategy Implementation Workshop, an event held this past October that was an "an important step in the accomplishment of the IC-wide EEO and Diversity Cross-Cutting Emphasis Area Plan (CCEAP) by providing each of the IC Agencies with the mechanisms and direction. . . ."
I won't bore you with the rest, but it is an astonishing compendium of bureaucratic gibberish guaranteed either to put you to sleep if you simply read it, or to give you nightmares if you pause to think about its implications.
Perhaps Mr. Kerr is ignorant (if so, that would be cause for his firing) of the case of Nada Prouty, a 37-year old illegal alien from Lebanon who was hired by the FBI (from her waitress job at a restaurant owned by her brother-in-law- who is now on the lam for financially supporting Hezbollah) under a "diversity plan". She was later transferred and promoted to the CIA, despite no previous espionage experience. She was later discovered to have illegally accessed CIA files in a bid to uncover what information the CIA possessed about Hezb'allah (such as double agents, leakers,means and methods by which he CIA tries to penetrate Hezb'allah and follow its actions). Thomas Lifson adds:
I wonder if he mentioned the AIDS quilt as another vital part of the solution?
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