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WILL CONGRESS CRIPPLE INTELLIGENCE OVERSIGHT?

Congressional oversight of intelligence may be sharply diminished as
a result of ongoing negotiations between House and Senate conferees
over pending intelligence reform legislation, the Los Angeles Times
reported yesterday.

"Sen. John D. 'Jay' Rockefeller IV (D-W. Va.), a member of the
conference committee, said the Senate's chief negotiators had
accepted a House demand stripping out all congressional oversight
of the national intelligence director," wrote Mary Curtius in the
Los Angeles Times.   more »

Richard Posner, as I'm sure many of you know, is one of the nation's top "public intellectuals" in addition to his role as a judge on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals.

Posner is gearing up to promote his new book, Catastrophe: Risk and Response. He is a first-rate legal mind but is not an expert on counterterrorism. So why is he opining on the 911 report?

As he says here while guest-blogging over at Larry Lessig's place:

[Yo]u don't have to be an expert in a field to criticize the experts, provided you know enough about the field to understand what the experts are saying and writing, to be able to spot internal contradictions and other logical lapses, sources of bias, arguments obviously not based on knowledge, carelessness in the use of evidence, lack of common sense, and mistaken predictions. These are the analytical tools that judges, who in our system are generalists rather than specialists, bring to the task of adjudicating cases in specialized fields of law.

Posner was referring to some criticism of his blog comments on global warming, but the point is equally applicable to Posner's sharply critical remarks on the 911 report.

Posner is complimentary toward the narrative section of the report, but he offers some cogent analysis of the commissions's prescriptive failings. Here is the central thrust of his argument:

The way a problem is described is bound to influence the choice of how to solve it. The commission's contention that our intelligence structure is unsound predisposed it to blame the structure for the failure to prevent the 9/11 attacks, whether it did or not. And pressure for unanimity encourages just the kind of herd thinking now being blamed for that other recent intelligence failure -- the belief that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.

So what Posner goes on to say is that it doesn't follow that deep structural problems are to blame for the 911 attacks. Rather, the problems are managerial.