Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader has found a new site to add over to the Reputable News area of the site. It is NewsfeedOnline. Newsfeed is a sort of clipping service for news. Not like your Maximum Leader doesn’t already read over all of the Reuters news wires on Yahoo. But your Maximum Leader doesn’t have (or try to make) the time to read lots of different news sites (after the Reuters wire that is). And your Maximum Leader must admit that he has never really been a fan of Drudge. Can’t explain why, maybe it is the complete lack of aesthetics on the Drudge site that annoys him.
Really. Just look at them: Drudge/Newsfeed
Drudge is just a jumble of links. Newsfeed is more elegant, streamlined, and with those summaries you can find something interesting quickly.
Indeed, your Maximum Leader chanced upon this link from the Christian Science Monitor by visiting Newsfeed. The article is deserving of some comment.
There is quite a bit of hubub right now concerning the desire (or possible desire) of the 9/11 Commission to push for a unified head of America’s 15 various intelligence agencies. Your Maximum Leader learned from the CS Monitor article that Bush could, by Executive Order, give the Director of Central Intelligence (aka: the Director of the CIA) more authority over some of the other intelligence agencies.
Some may say that such an order might be a wise first step, but your Maximum Leader thinks not. Really, do we need another layer of bureaucracy in our already bureaucrat-heavy intelligence community? How about this for a radical idea: Combine different agencies and make them accountable to one Director?
Your Maximum Leader has never quite understood how the NSA, National Reconaisance Office, and some of the other agencies grew up independently. Why could they not be put under the aegis of the CIA? Then they would share resources, share expertise, and share accountability under a single director.
Creating some sort of Uber-Intelligence Director (the Intel Tsar?) will not facilitate the sharing of information between agencies. It will mean that intelligence summaries will all be passed to one bureaucrat who will then have to pass them through their own group of analysts before passing them along to decision-takers.
One would thik that the need for quick action and speed would be apparent to lawmakers (and the members of the 9/11 Commission). But they all seem to be in labouring in the fog of groupthink. Sad really. We don’t need more bureaucrats in Washington. We need more spooks (especially Arab spooks) in the field.
Carry on.
