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The MAZZ-INT Blog
06/01/2009 - She Said/He Said: So Much for Building TrustNorth Korea is testing nuclear weapons, fighting is intensifying in Pakistan's Swat Valley, and the White House 60 Cyber Review has been released, but the political brawl over whether Speaker Nancy Pelosi was or was not mislead by the CIA regarding the use of waterboarding seems to be confirming the point I was making in these pages last month about the lack of trust between the Intelligence Community (IC) and Congress. Read This Blog 04/30/2009 - Rebuilding Trust In mid April I thought the just released ODNI Inspector General's assessment from last November of how the DNI/ODNI is failing to deliver on expectations five years on would be more than controversial enough for us to discuss. Then came the events of Maersk Alabama, the bravery of her Captain Richard Phillips and skills of the Navy Seals that forced the nation to finally take notice of the piracy problem off of the Horn of Africa --- certainly there are some intelligence issues here worth exploring. As I am writing though the media is consumed by the release of Justice Department memos on "enhanced interrogation" techniques authorized by Bush Administration against high value Al Qaida captives and whether the memos should have been released, if the US engaged in torture, and what if any legal action should be taken against those involved. Making this story even more compelling is whether senior Congressional Democrats gave tacit approval to these enhanced interrogation techniques by not objecting to them at the time when they where briefed about them by the Bush Administration. The problem with the so called "torture memos" is what am I going to tell you that you have not read already? Not much is what I suspect. Read This Blog 04/02/2009 - IT'S TAX TIME AND AMERICA NEEDS A CPA! Since December I have been wanting to write about cyber, but realizing this topic is going to be with us for awhile I deferred to more immediate and less controversial topics such as grading DNI McConnell's performance ----- you remember the "gentlemen's B," which I still think is a high mark since I wasn't grading on a curve and his predecessor got an "incomplete" for the course! DNI Blair did his first media availability on 26 March and that is usually good MAZZ- INT fodder, but in the 22 page transcript I didn't see any thing you or I have not already read in the Early Bird! Read This Blog 02/02/2009 - A GENTLEMAN'S "B" FOR THE OUTGOING DNI January and the inauguration of President Obama have offered up a smorgasbord of delicious topics on which to engage. There is John Brennan reemerging as the Deputy National Security Advisor for Counterterrorism and the accompanying discussion about whether the National Security Council and the Homeland Security Council should be merged. Perhaps we should deconstruct Denny Blair's confirmation testimony for clues about how he will run the Intelligence Community (IC); or we could debate the wisdom of the President's decision to nominate Leon Panetta to be CIA Director. Then there is Bob Gates' Senate Armed Services Committee testimony now as President Obama's Secretary of Defense on the department's priorities that we could explore for their impact on the IC. However, since Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Mike McConnell and the ODNI staff spent considerable effort in January documenting the performance of the DNI and by extension the IC during the McConnell tenure it is here that I want to dwell with my own evaluation. Read This Blog 01/09/2009 - THE INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY IN THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION Because there was so little to comment on about the Obama Administration's incoming Intelligence Team, my original intention was to write about the National Comprehensive Security Initiative (NCSI) and the reports that a federal government Cyber Czar would soon be established. Aside from John Brennan's decision in late November to withdraw from consideration for the post of CIA Director, "No Drama Obama" seemed an apt phrase to capture the transition of the IC leadership. As a news story, Intelligence was right where the Obama Transition Team wanted it - on the back burner. This situation changed abruptly though after New Years with the unexpected nomination of Leon Panetta to be CIA Director along with the expected announcement of Denny Blair to be Director of National Intelligence (DNI). Read This Blog 12/15/2008 - WHAT PRESIDENT OBAMA SHOULD ASK HIS DNI ON DAY ONE Before getting into what I believe the next DNI should focus on, I suppose its worth considering briefly why President Elect Obama did not name his Director of National Intelligence (DNI) or CIA Director along with the rest of his National Security team on 30 November. According to informed reporting, retired Admiral Denny Blair was slated to be named DNI and John Brennan-- current CEO of TAC, Clinton PDB Briefer, first NCTC Director, and senior Intelligence advisor to the Obama campaign - Director of CIA. According to unconfirmed second hand insider reports, Denny Blair's nomination is being reconsidered because the Obama Transition Team is concerned about establishing the DNI as a military position. Just a few days before the President Elect introduced his national security team, John Brennan publicly announced he was withdrawing his name from consideration for any senior IC post so as not to be a "distraction" to the new administration because of concerns raised by a coalition of 200 psychiatrists about his tacit acceptance of "enhance interrogation techniques" while at CIA. In my view these are inconsequential reasons for denying our next President and the IC the service of two outstanding individuals who would be ready to lead the IC from the moment of confirmation. Read This Blog 11/10/2008 - IC INDUSTRY DAYS: CHOCOLATE ICE CREAM OR MANURE? Since joining the "for profit" private sector of the industrial base associated with the Intelligence Community (IC) in June of 2006 I have found it necessary to go various agency industry days on a regular basis, and to be blunt with the exception of NSA events and the ODNI's second one I am tired of being fed manure in a sugar cone and being told its chocolate ice cream! Worse, I get the feeling that those intelligence agency officials organizing these industry days actually believe that they are delivering chocolate ice cream, i.e. what the private sector wants to learn at an industry day. Read This Blog 10/10/2008 - IT'S NOT A BAILOUT FOR THE IC BUT IT IS AN OPPORTUNITY FOR THE DNI Throughout the month of September there was a considerable amount of media attention focused on the President's Comprehensive National Cyber Initiative (CNCI). Given the importance of cyber to our national security, the extant threats and vulnerabilities, as well as the complex policy and questions about who should lead the government's cyber efforts, I thought this would be a good topic for AFCEA's monthly intel blog. When I saw what the national economic crisis did to the Presidential and Vice Presidential debates it occurred to me that talking about the intelligence issues associated with CNCI, as important as they are, is not what most people care about right now. Read This Blog 09/08/2008 - TOO MANY CONTRACTORS; TOO MUCH COST? The recently concluded Democratic and Republican Party Conventions provided excellent made for TV political drama, but not surprisingly offered no insight about how either of the Presidential candidates feels about changes in the Intelligence Community (IC). We do know, however, that both Senator Obama and Senator McCain view change as good and that government contractors need to be reined in. We also know from the FY 09 Intelligence Authorization Bill that was not enacted because of partisan differences over language on interrogation techniques that at least the IC Congressional oversight committees want to reduce the number of contractors used by the IC and that they believe contractors should not be allowed to execute "inherently government functions." Read This Blog 08/04/2008 - IC VISION 2015: Too Little and Too Slow! In late July the DNI released "VISION 2015: A Globally Networked and Integrated Intelligence Enterprise." In his cover letter for this glossy 22 page nicely illustrated document Mike McConnell reminds us that the Intelligence Community (IC) "is still largely structured, staffed, and operated around a design optimized for a different era" and VISION 2015 is meant to lay out a path towards globally networked and integrated IC "based on the principles of integration, collaboration, and innovation." Read This Blog 07/08/2008 - IRAQ: IF IT ISN'T ABOUT OIL TODAY IT SHOULD BE The Defense Supplemental Appropriations Bill was passed during the last week in June and action on the compromise FISA legislation was deferred until after the Congress' 4th of July recess so the Intelligence Community (IC) will at least have funds if not complete authority to operate for the rest of FY 08 on behalf of the nation's security. Other than that I am at loss for topics of significance (at least to me) about the health and status of the IC that has pretty much been the staple of this blog. Of course, spending $45.00 two to three times a week to fill up my Honda CR-V could have me distracted, so let's talk about energy, the IC and national security. Read This Blog 05/27/2008 - THE IC OUTSOURCING CONUNDRUM Despite the collected wisdom of those who know about this stuff (i.e. congressional staffers) that it is unlikely there will be an intelligence authorization bill for the third year in row, I was interested in the language of the authorization bills recently reported out by both the House Permanent Select Committee for Intelligence (HPSCI) and the Senate Select Committee for Intelligence (SSCI). The reason there won't be an FY 2009 Intelligence Authorization Bill is because the executive branch through the IC finds both versions fatally flawed on interrogation techniques the CIA should be allowed to employ. Read This Blog 05/06/2008 - INTELLIGENCE AND THE CONCEPT OF "CUSTOMERS" LTG Rich Zahner's observation two weeks ago at the AFCEA Spring Intelligence Symposium on Breaking Down Barriers to Information Sharing that intelligence is meant for decision makers vice customers brought one of my favorite hobby horses out of the barn --- the ill conceived concepts of intelligence community customers. Read This Blog 04/08/2008 - WHO REALLY READS THIS STUFF ?!?! My apologies for being a week late with this month's meandering thoughts on the IC, but it seems my trip to attend the DoDIIS Conference in mid March took more out of me than excursions like this in the past use to. Then there are is all that "day job" stuff at Oracle's National Security Group that keeps diverting me. Read This Blog 03/03/2008 - A ZOO STORY - OR CONTEXT MATTERS My original plan for this month's Intelligence Community (IC) color commentary was do a traditional book review on A.J. Rossmiller's recently published STILL BROKEN: A Recruit's Inside Account of Intelligence Failure from Baghdad to the Pentagon. Given Mr. Rosesmiller's brief experience with DIA, before even reading a word my reaction was that the title was presumptive at best and suggested an agenda. Two hundred and twenty six pages later of mostly anecdotal pap he proved me right. It seems DIA's new hire analysts were consistently producing highly useable intelligence about Iraq only to be thwarted by managers who found their reporting to be unusable because it was too pessimistic to be taken seriously by policy makers. The idea that because something is new to him does not ipso facto make it new to the IC appears to be a condition Rossmiller has not contemplated. Read This Blog 02/06/2008 - I WISH YOU WOULDN'T BRING THOSE ISSUES UP I have been struggling all of January to find something interesting (at least to me ) to write about regarding the IC for this space, but IC related news seems to be dominated by the debate over FISA and the destruction of the CIA interrogation tapes. At first I was looking for Lawrence Wright's "NEW YORKER" article on DNI McConnell to bail me out, but 16,000 words later all I found there was Mike's traditional definition of torture and that Jim Clapper has made count down clocks all the rage amongst the IC senior leadership. Read This Blog 01/03/2008 - INEVITABLE SURPRISES At this time of year all the talk shows and newspapers do some kind of year in review with projections for the new year and that's what I was planning to do here for the Intelligence Community but I am going to demur, as it seems to me that the most significant event of 2007 with the likely greatest impact for 2008 occurred on 27 December ----- the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in Rawalpindi Pakistan. Read This Blog 11/27/2007 - ARE WE SPENDING ENOUGH ON INTELLIGENCE? WE PROBABLY ARE! Well, the DNI implied back on 30 October that the United States will spend $43.5 billion on intelligence in FY 08 and the security of the republic seems not to have been impaired. Read This Blog 10/29/2007 - IF WE COULD ONLY COLLABORATE AS MUCH AS WE TALK ABOUT IT ! Last month I gave you my slant on the September Analytic Transformation Conference in Chicago, where the IC dignitary seemed to conclude that collaboration across the IC would indeed be transformational. Read This Blog 09/28/2007 - WHAT WE HAVE HERE IS A FAILURE TO COLLABORATE! I was in Chicago the week after Labor Day for the DNI's "Analytic Transformation - Moving Forward Together - Symposium" where 400 Intelligence Community (IC) "dignitary" gathered to affirm their belief that information sharing and collaboration enabled by technology can now truly transform intelligence analysis. Read This Blog 08/28/2007 - CONFLICTED Several intelligence issues worthy of examination and discussion emerged in August. There's the NIE on the "Prospects for Iraq's Stability;" the Foreign Surveillance debate between the Congress and the DNI; and the Congressionally mandated release of CIA's Inspector General's 2005 report on the Agency's performance pre 9-11. Read This Blog 06/29/2007 - DEEP PENETRATION Like many of you I have just read (OK, I listened to the book tape) George Tenet's AT THE CENTER OF THE STORM My Years at the CIA, and like some of you I was in the audience on 19 June to hear Bill Studeman's remarks as he accepted the Baker Award. Both speak to the state of America's Intelligence Community (IC) ----- Tenet in terms of explanation and Studeman in terms of prescription. ---- in an unintended issue/response complimentary way. Read This Blog Authors are entirely responsible for opinions expressed in material appearing in AFCEA publications and online products, and these opinions are not to be construed as official or reflecting the views of the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association. This is a moderated blog, and all comments are subject to review prior to posting. Approved comments will appear within 24 hours. |
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