Fascinating interview with intelligence historian Matthew Aid, author of new book Intel Wars, on NPR’s Fresh Air Well worth listening to. Why America’s Spies Struggle To Keep Up “In Intel Wars, historian Matthew Aid details how bureaucratic policies and a glut of raw data have weakened the intelligence community in its war against would-be terrorists.”
Tag Archives: interagency cooperation
Paul Bedard/U.S. News: Ridge book makes additional assertions
Former DHS head Tom Ridge’s new book has made headlines with the assertion that h was pressured to raise the national threat level prior to the 2004 elections.
His credibility on this point can be questioned since the matter has come up before, to which he’s responded “We don’t do politics” at the Department of Homeland Security. The standard question on cross-examination, as any third-year law student should be able to tell you, would be: Were you lyingthen, or are you lyingnow?
Either way, not a favorable impression of Secretary Ridge’s credibility. Let’s then put aside the question of the 2004 pre-election threat levels.
Paul Bedard at U.S. New & World Report reports that the book also contains the following assertions:
- Ridge was never invited to sit in on National Security Council meetings;
- was “blindsided” by the FBI in morning Oval Office meetings because the agency withheld critical information from him
- found his urgings to block Michael Brown from being named head of the emergency agency blamed for the Hurricane Katrina disaster ignored
Mr. Bedard is the author/editor of a feature at USN&WR called Washington Whispers, which we’ll be adding to our RSS feeds.
Assume what one wants about the 2004 elections and the threat levels. Bedard has spotted more troubling issues – (1) and (2) supra suggest that creating the Departmen of Homeland Security may have been a meaningless gesture, and that protestations of interagency cooperation were disingenuous; (3) suggests that someone may actually have spotted the problems with employing someone as FEMA head without any qualifications other than English fluency.
makes assertions
Matthew Wald, NYT: “Plan for Nuclear Storage Is Slow to Form”
Matthew Wald has this piece on the Times website:
Nov. 4 — The Energy Department has not finished plans to consolidate storage of nuclear bomb fuel and other high-risk materials now spread among numerous sites, even though the department said in 2005 that it would do so within about a year, according to a Government Accountability Office report to be released Monday.As a result, the department is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to defend additional sites.
The G.A.O. had reported that the Energy Department was putting off making security improvements at some of the storage sites because the sites were due to be phased out. But the new report makes clear that the goal of shutting down some obsolete weapons and research centers, and simplifying the security job by centralizing “special nuclear material,” as bomb fuel is called, has yet to advance from concept to plan, let alone to finished project.
The Energy Department “has completed only two of the eight implementation plans for consolidating and disposing of special nuclear material,” the new report found, and it cited problems with those two plans.