Congressional Committee Wants 'Cultural Revolution' Inside CIA, FBI
NewsMax.com
Thursday, October 4, 2001
If the powerful House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence gets its way, both the super secret CIA and the FBI will have someone looking over their shoulders.
The Committee called for the creation of a 10-member commission to study "the preparedness and performance” of both agencies and others involved in intelligence gathering, according to Wednesday's New York Times.
In a report submitted to the House along with legislation dealing with intelligence matters, the committee avers that it is urgent that the "many critical problems” facing the agencies be addressed.
The Committee report states that it "does not in any way lay blame to the dedicated men and women of the U.S. intelligence community for the success of [the September 11] attacks. If blame must be assigned, the blame lies with the government, as a whole, that did not fully understand nor wanted to appreciate the significance of the new threats to our national security despite the warnings offered by the intelligence community.”
But the report frankly states that there has been a "culture of risk aversion” with the agencies and noted that the politically correct 1995 guidelines crippled the CIA’s ability to effectively gather intelligence.
As a result the committee insisted that there must be what it called a "cultural revolution” inside the agencies.
The committee bore down heavily on the lack of a sufficient number of intelligence operatives having foreign language skills.
"At the [National Security Agency] and C.I.A., thousands of pieces of data are never analyzed of are analyzed ‘after the fact’ because there are too few analysts, even fewer with the necessary language skills,” the report charged.
Even in Utah, where members of the 300th Military Intelligence Brigade - the most respected linguists in the armed forces - are trying to translate thousands of hours of intercepted communications retrieved by the NSA, CIA and FBI, things are difficult.
With as much help as they can get from Mormon missionaries, who do work all over the world and can be recruited for their language skills, Arabic languages, sadly, are not among those spoken by the missionaries because the Mormon Church does not proselytize in Islamic Countries.
