Untitled Document

16 April 2004

Down the Tracks

It is the first round of the Stanley Cup Playoffs and I have finally got around to wondering what is up with the Red Wings, my erstwhile hometown team.

I have a vague fondness for the old hockey clubs from the Golden Years in the snowbound northeastern corner of the country. The National Hockey League expanded dramatically in the nineties, and I discovered with some bemusement that the Wings are playing a team called the Nashville Predators.

Nashville. I had no idea there was ice in Nashville. But then the Red Wings stopped being the bunch of hulking Canadian kids a long time ago when management hired the most of what had been the Soviet Red Army Central Team. They became available on the market just about the time the league expanded.

I don't think there is a necessary connection between the two events, but they are certainly synergistic. I'm pleased I had the opportunity to use that word today. I hadn't heard it in a while. It used to be the most-used word in Washington, but its currency has passed. It is passe.

John Lehman used to be passe. He was God or Secretary of the Navy, I forget which, back in the Reagan Administration. He was a high-handed Secretary, and that aspect of his formidable personality eventually got him in some ethical trouble.

But he has been rehabilitated, all the old troubles forgotten, and he was appointed as a Republican member of the 9/11 Commission. He and his panel-mates have been hearing the testimony of the parade of notables have squirmed and shifted in their seats and explained the reasons they were on vacation that August, or why the news didn't get processed, or shared.

Or why the two terrorists living in San Diego under their true names who had been mentioned in the USS Cole investigation and who were associates of the al Qaida bunch that met in Malaysia weren't tracked down in time. They didn't even need to be tracked. They were right there in plain sight. Mr. Lehman says change is coming down the tracks, inexorable as a locomotive.

I thought the White House was going to try to preempt the conclusions of the Panel by making an announcement about reorganizing the Intelligence Community, but they blew a chance with a big audience earlier this week.

The Administration is not lacking for material to consider. We got a question from a Senate Staffer one time when I was in the business of producing Budget Justification. He wanted a copy of all the Blue Ribbon panels that had been chartered since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

I think we found ten reports, all of them weighing a couple pounds. I'm not sure we found them all, since they sink like stones and are mostly used for door stops. I had a lot of hope for the last one, which General Brent Scowcroft ran two years ago.

I have always been impressed with General Scowcroft. He was the National Security Advisor to the first Bush Administration. In their desperation to defelct the damning testimony of the 9/11 Panel, the White House has apparently latched onto his report to get in front of the Panel's final report. They did the same thing with the Department of Homeland Security.

We have seen how that turned out. But something is coming down the tracks, one way of another, according to John Lehman. There could be a proposal to create a powerful new post of Director of National Intelligence.

That is what the Director of Central Intelligence is supposed to be. I worked for his staff that did policy for a couple years. It was a frustrating job. We worked at the headquarters of the CIA, and were essentially hostages on the placid campus at Langley.

Mr. Tenet said that he would not have designed the current system the way they did in 1947 when the CIA was created and the Department of Defense bashed together out of the components of the Departments of War and the Navy. There are fifteen different members of the Intelligence Community, and every one of them thinks they have a veto over change.

That has to be fixed. It has needed it for a long time. But the intelligence community has always looked outward, or at least it has since the 1975 Rockefeller Commission report described the CIA as a rogue organization. The next year the Senate's Church Commission called the CIA a criminal organization.

You can imagine the consequences of that. The CIA and the rest of the community was gutted of authority and became timid. Accordingly the FBI got the charter to bring our enemies to heel by conducting investigations making arrests. Not that there were many of them. There has to be a crime first. That is what law enforcement does. It prosecutes crime. Once something happens. They are prohibited from taking proactive measures. That used to be the province of us over in the National Security side of the house.

So changes are coming for the FBI, since they seem to be the designated scapegoat of the 9/11 Commission. I can't say they haven't earned it. There is talk about establishing a new within the bureau to conduct domestic intelligence operations. But I think it is a non-starter.

My bet is they will establish a new post and a new staff, not give it enough money or authority to do anything and leave it at that. But maybe the system will surprise me. I like to think that we can actually adapt and change. Senator Kerry smells a campaign issue here, and he is developing his own proposal, and Jane Harmon, the ranking minority member on the House Intel Committee is drafting some legislation. So I think there will be a lot of pressure to act, just like there was with the Department of Homeland Security.

Which is still an oxymoron.

But like squeezing a toothpaste tube with the cap screwed tight, the toothpaste is likely squirt some place we don't expect.

But heck, I didn't expect to see professional hockey in Nashville either, much less see the Red Wings have to rally to go one game up in the best-of-seven series last night. It is three games to two, and the Wings can win it tomorrow night. On Nashville ice.

"When you have the lead, you force them to take chances" said Detroit left wing Brendan Shanahan. He scored the goals that put the Wings out front last night. He is 6'3" and actually from Canada. Maybe there is hope, after all.

But his statement is going to be applicable to a lot of things this year. There is something coming down the tracks. We just don't know what it is yet.