Previewing its July/August issue, Commentary has just posted Gabriel Schoenfeld's essay on George Tenet's memoir: "The CIA follies (cont'd)." The title of Schoenfeld's essay alludes to his previous related essays "Could September 11 have been averted?" (December 2001) and "What became of the CIA?" (March 2005). Like the earlier essays, the current essay is must reading.

I asked Gabriel Schoenfeld if he would highlight his findings for us. He has graciously responded:

What is preventing al Qaeda from striking us again? There can be little doubt that the offensive war that American military forces have been waging against the terror network in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, and other points around the globe has greatly complicated the effort to carry out a second plot. But we don’t know what we don’t know. We do know that in al Qaeda we are facing a very patient adversary: eight years elapsed between the first attack on the World Trade Center and the second which brought it down.

In contending with the unknown dangers facing us, we depend heavily on an intelligence apparatus that has had chronic problems in carrying out its basic functions. The FBI and the CIA are at its center. Both organizations have invested heavily in counterterrorism in the six years that have passed since September 11, 2001. But both organizations have had chronic problems. Have they been resolved? Have they even been addressed? So far we’ve seen reconfigurations of the organizational chart and the recruitment of new personnel. But have the dysfunctional internal culture of these bureaucracies been significantly altered? The evidence suggests that it has not been.

As I conclude in my essay on the CIA follies, a radical and imaginative reconception of the CIA remains an urgent necessity. The form this reconception should take is wide open for informed debate. As was the case during World War II and the glory days of the Office of Strategic Services, the CIA’s precursor, there can be little doubt that many of America’s best minds and hardiest spirits would rush to join an effective organization engaged in derring-do against our implacable adversaries. But the longer things stay roughly as they are, with the agency a sclerotic bureaucracy mired in mediocrity, the more it will continue to attract only those who, like George Tenet himself, get their jobs, as he himself acknowledges, because no one else wants them.

Posted by Scott at 07:44 AM  |    |