Good question

Why does the CIA still exist?

On a regular basis, politicians of all stripes will bloviate about the need to trim the federal budget, eliminate waste, and generally have government do a better job for the taxpayers. Well, here's a suggestion, something that would plug a giant black hole that's sucking dollars into some bizarre netherworld, the government should get rid of the Central Intelligence Agency. It was created following World War II in response to the Cold War. Communism with a Capital C posed such an existential threat that various policy-makers decided it would be a good idea for the U.S. to have a permanent intelligence service that functioned independently of every other agency.

From what I can tell, those people, from President Truman on down the government chain of command, were pretty much totally wrong. Based on everything I've seen and read about the CIA's performance over the past 7 decades, everything they touch turns to crap. They work really, really hard and still manage to be dead wrong over and over and over. Either that, on those rare occasions when they've got it right and they really do know what's going on, they don't bother to tell anyone what they know.

I know. I know. I've ranted on this subject before. So what inspired this latest rant? I just finished reading The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. By the time I was done with it, I was starting to feel like strapping on a C-4 vest myself and heading for Langley wouldn't be a bad idea. There's nothing quite like learning that the guys in the CIA thought it was more important to keep hoarding data than it was to bother telling anyone in the FBI's counter-terrorism unit that several known terrorists were in the U.S. and taking flying lessons. The fact that Al Qaeda and other groups had been talking for many years about (a) taking a second shot at the World Trade Center and (b) flying airplanes into buildings was apparently irrelevant. After all, alerting the FBI would have let Al Qaeda know that U.S. intelligence was tracking them. Words fail me. I'd love to know what the point of gathering intelligence is if you don't plan to ever use it. If you're not going to use it, then that intelligence gathering is as pointless as hoarding used matchbooks or Hummel figurines.

Bottom line. The Central Intelligence Agency knew what Al Qaeda was up to, they knew it was just a matter of time, and they did absolutely nothing to prevent it. Tell them to go into another country and figure out a way to overthrow its government and they're right there, setting up coups and doing the happy dance. Suggest to them that maybe they do something proactive to help their own country and what's the response? A stone wall, silence, and active efforts to prevent U.S. law enforcement from finding out just what the CIA does know. I'd suggest that the next time around the terrorists go after CIA headquarters, but why would they? Based on all the evidence, the one building in the country that's never going to be a terrorist target is that structure in Langley, Virginia.

National Security Agency buildings and operatives should be pretty safe, too. They're another agency that has a pack rat mentality: they also hoard data apparently solely for the sake of hoarding data. Neither agency is much of a threat to any potential terrorists; CIA and NSA are voyeurs, not actors. They like to watch, but they're never going to do anything useful. If they do act, they'll manage to get it wrong or create a situation that leads to major headaches down the road -- the CIA isn't real good at thinking about long term consequences. If they were, they'd never have cooperated with the Pakistani intelligence service in supporting the taliban.

Of course, when it comes to anti-terrorism efforts and our bungling government, the CIA isn't exactly alone in its stupidity. One of the more depressing sections of the book describes the FBI's attempts to investigate the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen. The American ambassador to Yemen apparently created more problems for the investigative team than any of the Yemeni officials did. According to multiple sources, Barbara Bodine was more concerned with preserving the illusion of good relations with the Yemeni government than she was in helping find out exactly who was responsible for the deaths of American sailors. When the FBI's lead investigator returned to New York, Bodine refused to allow him to re-enter the country, which effectively knee-capped the investigation. At the time (and continuing to this day, for that matter) Yemen was teeming with operatives and cells of various jihadist groups, a fact that was well-known in the intelligence community but Bodine apparently preferred to ignore. In a just world, Bodine would now be rotting in some obscure hellhole, demoted to file clerk status or teaching at a cash-strapped community college, but no such luck -- she's a regular lecturer at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Political and International Affairs.

I say "illusion of good relations" because another thing that's become abundantly clear through the various books I've read on the subject is that the U.S. in general can be truly stupid in figuring out what's going on in the minds of our "allies." Maybe it's an American fault, but over and over we get lied to, sometimes in truly outrageous no-one-in-their-right-mind-would-believe-this-crap fashion, but the politicians keep right on taking people solely at face value. The Saudis repeatedly told the Americans, yes, we'll help you get Osama while at the same time they were steering money into the terrorists' treasuries. Al Qaeda would never have succeeded without the active, albeit covert, support of multiple Arab governments. Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Libya, Egypt. . . none of them worried about Al Qaeda and similar groups as long as those groups stayed in Afghanistan.

I'm not quite sure just what the takeaway is for me from this latest excursion into the incompetent cesspool that is American government. I already knew bureaucracies tend to be incredibly inefficient, and the more money that gets poured into them without any accountability, the more inefficient and incompetent they become. The CIA is a black hole: what are they spending money on? Who knows -- it's all classified, but Charlie Wilson's War with its descriptions of million dollar payrolls for Afghan warlords did a nice job of illustrating how easy it is for them to waste money. Further, all bureaucracies tend to end up focusing more on preserving their personal turf than on the reason they were created in the first place. And of course I knew that there are always desk monkeys who over-interpret the rules and create roadblocks where none should exist. You run into those people everywhere, from the power-tripping jerk at the DMV who doesn't want to accept your out of state birth certificate as legitimate because it's not exactly the same format as the one his state uses to the Human Resources clerks who insist on remarkably narrow definitions for job qualifications. I guess I just hadn't realized just how bad it was in the parts of the government we all hope are actually trying to help us, and for sure you don't expect to see pretty vindictiveness and personal power tripping on the ambassadorial level.

It is definitely time for me to stop reading recent American history -- I need to immerse myself in some upbeat, cheery fiction for awhile, something that will look good compared to the morass that is the current "war on terror." It's definitely time to re-read Game of Thrones. 

Was anyone actually surprised?

Once again, I'm coming late to the party in discussing this, but it's another one of those topics that doesn't seem to want to go away. I've got to admit I don't get it. Were there actually still naifs wandering around the U.S. who did not know the government spies on people all the time? Has J. Edgar Hoover been dead so long now that everyone's forgotten how he managed to stay Director-for-Life of the FBI? Hoover had dossiers on anyone and everyone in government. He controlled Presidents. And he did it all through the use of technology that by today's standards was laughably primitive: listening at keyholes, breaking into people's homes or motel rooms when they weren't there to install microphones that were hardwired to reel-to-reel tape recorders bigger than a modern carry-on suitcase, illegally wiretapping people's telephones and having real live humans sit there listening, steno pad in hand. One of the saddest stories I ever read was about the FBI agent who was tasked with spying on Martin Luther King. He spent years listening to King's phone calls, 99% of which were the usual mundane calls we all make. Can  you imagine spending a career listening to one guy's phone calls because the Director was convinced that sooner or later that person would confess to being a Communist?

If anything, I find the NSA kerfuffle oddly reassuring. First, because a whistle-blower was able to look at an aggregate picture and view spying on ordinary citizens as wrong. After all, there were hundreds of FBI agents spying on individual people for decades and they never suffered any apparent guilt or moral qualms, or, if they did, they kept those doubts to themselves. A number of agents did admit long after the fact that they weren't happy about Hoover's anti-Communist obsessions and where it led the agency, but they followed orders anyway.

Second, the sheer size of the spying operations means the spy agencies are burying themselves in garbage data. Sure, you can set up search algorithms to fish for patterns, but when you're talking about millions of phone calls, emails, whatever, it takes a whole lot of processing power to find the occasional possible real threat. Which means, in a weird way, the NSA et al. are doing a nice job of stimulating the economy. Most of us might view electronic data as intangible, but it gets processed by real machinery. It's not magic; it's technology. Someone has to sell the spies all that computer equipment, buildings have to go up to house it, infrastructure is created (roads, utility systems), power is generated, and so on. And all the computer equipment requires people to run it. The various spy agencies have to hire people: clerks, janitors, security guards who manage to con their way into jobs as "analysts," etc. Jobs are created. Not exactly the economic stimulus most of us would prefer, but a stimulus nonetheless. It almost makes me wish I owned stock in Cray.

Book Review: Jack Ward Thomas: The Journals of Forest Service Chief

This book was a surprise.  I had low expectations going into it -- it wasn't a work I had much interest in reading prior to 'winning' it at the Forest History Society breakfast meeting in Portland back in March.  There were some really good books given away at that breakfast, and what did I get stuck with?  A tome that I fully expected to be laced with a lot of self-serving revisionist history.  I had never heard anything bad about Chief Thomas, but like most federal employees I'm pretty skeptical about the folks in the Washington offices.  After all, who in their right mind would actually want  to manage any federal agency? 

Turns out the answer to that question is not Jack Ward Thomas, at least according to him.  He had been the lead agency scientist dealing with the spotted owl controversy in the Pacific Northwest so had plenty of first-hand experience with Congressional committees and the mess politics can make of what to the professionals in the field look like pretty straightforward issues. He had even spent most of his career deliberately avoiding the training that would make him eligible for the Senior Executive Service (a prerequiste for anyone aspiring to the Chief's seat in DC; by tradition it was strictly a civil service position, not a political appointment).  All the previous chiefs had been foresters, a term that means a lot more within the Forest Service than it does to the general public because, among other things, it implies management responsibilities, and had along the way served as a forest supervisor or regional forester.  Thomas came from the wildlife research side of the agency, a dramatic switch for an agency that worships the memory of Gifford Pinchot.  Although Thomas doesn't dwell on it, by coming from wildlife rather than from forestry, he had to know there a huge old boy network within the agency that he had never been and never would be part of.  He was also the first Chief to be a political appointtee, and that he does dwell on -- he wasn't happy about it, and reiterates numerous times that he really wanted whoever succeeded him to be a return to the old tradition.

Thomas also doesn't speculate much about why he got tapped in 1992 by the Clinton administration to replace Chief Dale Robertson, but given his background -- wildlife management, not forestry -- and his involvement with the spotted owl study it seems like a fairly obvious signal to the environmental activist community that the new administration wasn't going to let the 'timber shop' drive the agency any longer.  Unfortunately, as Thomas makes clear, if there was any relationship that personified the dilemma of your friends causing more problems than your enemies, it might be that between environmental activists and the Clinton administration.  Thomas's descriptions of well-designed plans being stymied by the group they had been designed to help reminded me of a quote attributed to President Warren G. Harding -- Harding reportedly said he could deal with his enemies, but "Lord, save me from my friends."  Invariably, at least from Thomas's perspective, the result of environmental activism was to create more long-term problems than it solved.

It didn't help that the perception within the Forest Service, a perception that contributed a great deal to damaging employee morale, was that the Clinton administration was bending over backwards to cater to the environmentalists in an effort to gain the support of urban voters in Portland, Seattle, and other west coast cities.  There's no doubt a great deal of truth in that.  The problem was (and still is) that the environmental movement is extremely diverse, it includes people holding a wide range of opinions, and an action that satisfies one segment of that movement is almost always guaranteed to anger another.  Industry, in contrast, could easily present a unified message.  End result?  Major headaches out in the field, as local staff had to cope with demonstrations and protests, and major headaches in Washington, as Thomas and others tried to satisfy Congress.

Of course, one thing that employees in the field could not know for sure, but that Thomas was seeing up close was the penchant of administration officials, political appointees like Leon Panetta, to ignore the advice coming from within the agency.  Field staff from the various agencies involved in natural resource management -- Forest Service, Fish and Wildlife, the Bureau of Land Management, and so on -- would spend many months working on Environmental Impact Statements, soliciting public comments, exploring various alternates -- and then just before a plan, after years of work, was finally going to be implemented,  the White House would get a phone call from someone with a lot of personal influence and almost no actual knowledge of the facts on the ground,  and that was that.  Thomas mentions several examples of being blindsided by Panetta or someone else in the administration.  It's actually moderately amazing he stayed on as Chief as long as he did -- the job sounds like one long exercise in frustration.

Whether or not the Clinton administration was any better or worse than any other at engaging in micromanaging and second guessing the professional civil service is, of course, debatable.  If anything, it was probably typical.  Every administration comes in totally convinced that the outgoing administration managed to staff the upper levels of every agency with party hacks, various lobbyists had undo influence, and that policy was being driven totally by political considerations.  They spend a huge amount of time trying to 'clean house,' and by the time they figure out that some of the agency professionals do actually know what they're doing, they're running out of time to accomplish anything worthwhile before the next election.  And then it starts all over again.

Thomas does seem to have a thoroughly low and essentially nonpartisan opinion of politicians in general.  The Republicans might be industry tools, but the Democrats are equally lazy and ill-informed.  Hearings are called, but Senators and Representatives put in only token appearances, with a typical  Congressman or Senator showing up just long enough to do a little posturing that will make a good sound bite for the news media back in his or her home state and then vanishing.  After sitting through numerous Congressional hearings and seeing how remarkably ignorant and lazy the typical Congress critter was, Thomas is quietly appalled by his growing realization that what was actually shaping U.S. environmental policy is litigation.  Where does the real power in the federal government lie?  The Department of Justice.  DOJ decides which rules to enforce through criminal prosecution or civil litigation, DOJ decides which cases need to work their way up through the appeals process and which they'll try to find fast out of court settlements for, and they'll do it all without bothering to consult with the technical experts in any of the natural resource management agencies.  The hearings, the discussions, the fact-finding efforts are all just theater -- it's DOJ that decides what's actually going to happen.

Thomas's descriptions of some of the Senators and Representatives he had to deal with make it obvious politicians do not get elected based on brains.  It's quite clear he's convinced that the late Helen Chenoweth made the proverbial box of rocks look sentient in comparison, and Larry Craig wasn't much better.  Maybe it was something in the water in Idaho?

Overall, this book proved to be much more interesting than I was anticipating.  It was also oddly reassuring.  We hear so much these days about the partisan bickering in Washington, the inability of Congress to work together, and the general gridlock when it comes to changing or implementing policy.  But as I was reading this book, it read as though Thomas could have been writing his journal entries last month, not almost 20 years ago.  The more things change, the more they stay the same.  Should I be comforted by the fact that politicians haven't changed much, that Cabinet secretaries still fight turf battles, and that sometimes the good stuff that comes out of a decision is the result of unintended consequences and not actual thought?  Probably not, but it was reassuring to see that no matter what weirdness happens in DC there are still career civil servants out in the field fighting the good fight and doing their best to hold back chaos.

[A minor side note:  as a civil servant myself, one of the things that amused me was Thomas grousing about his annual performance review.  He's the Chief of the Forest Service, and he's as unhappy as any GS-4 technician about getting dinged for being less than "exceptional" on one aspect of the review.  It's the one thing everyone in federal service has in common -- we're all convinced our supervisors don't have a clue when they're assessing how good we are at our jobs.]

Economics, the invisible hand, and the free rider problem

I've been reading The Contested Boundaries of American Public Health on my lunch breaks at work. Just finished an interesting chapter on the economics of public health -- basically who pays, who benefits, and why. Public health is full of examples of publicly funded activities that benefit everyone, some more than others, but no one thinks about a whole lot: restaurant inspections, for example, and sewage treatment. I think most people, if they think about "public health" at all, assume it's basically an occasional vaccination clinic on the local level or, at the other extreme, Centers for Disease Control doctors dressed in hazmat suits a la Dustin Hoffman in Outbreak. They only really notice public health in the broad sense when the system doesn't seem to be working, like when a warning comes out about killer jalapeno peppers but no one at FDA or CDC or USDA can say definitively where the peppers came from, how many are out there, or even how many people have gotten sick.

That's usually when one of my libertarian or right wing acquaintances (not necessarily the same group; some of the libertarians are actually pretty far left but just don't realize it -- they're fiscal conservatives but social liberals) will start bloviating about the problem is the government. No, people, in this case the problem is the private sector. The data collection and reporting system on the local level, the first place any disease is going to be noticed, is so fragmented, so broken up into thousands and thousands of individual and incompatible information collection systems, that a whole lot of people have to start getting sick before anyone notices there's an epidemic.

The only time a salmonella outbreak is going to be noticed fast is if you have lots of people eating the same contaminated food and getting sufficiently sick that they all end up going to the same Emergency Room or clinic at the same time. If I buy a contaminated pepper, use it in salsa shared by half a dozen co-workers and we all get sick, if we all go to different doctors or clinics it could take two months for the various lab reports to wend their way through the system and raise the proverbial red flag that triggers an investigation. That's if the doctors decide to order lab work at all. If you're an adult who comes in with a fever and a bad case of diarrhea but aren't sick enough to be hospitalized and you're the only patient the doctor's seen that week with that particular set of symptoms, she may simply prescribe antibiotics and anti-diarrheals and tell you to come back if it doesn't improve fast once you start taking the drugs.

Bottom line is that public health is one area where more government, not less, is the solution. The government is the only entity that's ever going to come up with a way to tie all those fragmented pieces together. Private industry does not have a reason to. In fact, fragmentation is in industry's best interest because that fragmentation creates more opportunities for making money.

Granted, I am not exactly a disinterested bystander on this issue (I do, after all, work for Large Nameless Agency), but the more I learn about the way the system does and does not work and just how huge some of the gaping holes are the more I recognize just how screwed up American health care in general, not just the public health aspect, truly is. The U.S. infant mortality rate is an embarrassment, so is life expectancy compared to other industrialized nations, as a nation we pay the highest per capita costs for health care in the world, . . . it's a mess. And instead of trying to fix some of the really broken parts, the private sector health care interest groups (like pharmaceutical companies) focus on the areas with the highest profit margins, like erectile dysfunction and a nonexistent obesity 'epidemic.' Public hospitals flounder while the boutique clinics doing boob jobs thrive. Everyone wants the trauma center to be there when they're in a car accident, but no one wants to pay for it until then. It's a classic free rider problem, wanting the benefits without having to pay any of the costs, kind of like the workers in right-to-work states who refuse to pay union dues but expect the shop steward to help them with grievances anyway.

I have a number of "libertarian" acquaintances who are convinced the private sector is the way to go for everything. They don't see a role for government anywhere -- they're totally convinced that if we'd just step back and let business do what it wanted, the invisible hand of the marketplace would solve all problems. In other words, they either want to time travel back to the 19th century or move to Somalia. I'm never quite sure which, although I have a hunch they think that if they could just live in the glory days of the Grant administration they'd be one of the plutocrats riding in the posh private rail cars and not one of the poor bastards working 14 hours a day to lay the rails, despite the fact there were a whole lot more of the latter than the former.

At the same time, of course, they bitch whenever prices go up on anything. Hello? Ever hear of market forces? You can't have it both ways. There is no such thing as a free lunch.

The same group of acquaintances does a lot of pissing and moaning about paying taxes. They complain about it being "their" money and how they shouldn't have to fork over a dime. Period. For anything. Grow up. Taxes are the membership fee you pay for getting to live in a country that allows you to piss and moan about how much you hate the government.

So, I repeat -- if you think the U.S. government is doing such a crap job, and you hate paying taxes so much, move to Somalia. No taxes, no government, literally a libertarian paradise. You'll love it there. Granted, you probably won't live long (life expectancy is only 47) but the freedom from an oppressive government should make up for dying 30 years sooner than the average U.S. citizen*.

(*We may not live as long as Europeans, but we've still got most African nations beat.)