Pages

20 January 2010

ODNI Testimony on Intel Failures

The official version of the testimony is available here as a PDF.
Starting out...
I will now briefly discuss some of the details of the bombing attempt and what we missed. As the President has said, this was not—like in 2001—a failure to collect or share intelligence; rather it was a failure to connect, integrate, and understand the intelligence we had.

Gee. I feel better already as I plummet to my death in a fiery ball that moments ago was Oceanic Flight 815.

Some other highlights:
The United States Intelligence Community must constantly strive for and exhibit three characteristics essential to our effectiveness. The IC must be integrated: a team making the whole greater than the sum of its parts. We must also be agile: an enterprise with an adaptive, diverse, continually learning, and mission-driven intelligence workforce that embraces innovation and takes initiative. Moreover, the IC must exemplify America’s values: operating under the rule of law, consistent with Americans’ expectations for protection of privacy and civil liberties, respectful of human rights, and in a manner that retains the trust of the American people.

The four areas cited for improvement:
Policy
The Information Sharing Environment
Library of National Intelligence
Collaborative Tools/Capabilities

You notice that nowhere in there is the area of improvement "hold people accountable"? We're going to engineer a new system around the existing failure again... Last time we did this, we got the DNI, so of course the DNI thinks this is a great idea.

By: Brant

No comments:

Post a Comment