A Cozy Feel for a Bad Idea
December, 2002
It's said that a camel is a horse designed by committee and the Joint Congressional Committee investigating the 9/11 WTC attack has come up with a three-humper.
They propose a Cabinet-level position, a Director of National Intelligence, to whom all other agencies would be responsible.
It feels warm and cozy.
Instead of the CIA Director, the FBI Director and the NSA Director as scapegoats du jour, Congress and the President would at last have a cabinet level scapegoat---one guy to point at, and an appointee as well, as are all Cabinet members.
Nice touch.
A hotshot the minority party can denigrate for not doing the job. A Director of Directors, a Czar who changes every four or eight years and who can (with varying degrees of expertise) muddle up the works of agencies whose workings are largely secret and whose internal mechanisms have been developed over decades.
Well, of course they'll freeze him out, then wait him out. It's an appointment designed to fail.
There have been fai…