> -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On > Behalf Of Deborah Harrell > Sent: Wednesday, June 07, 2006 3:56 PM > To: [email protected] > Subject: History lessons not learned? > > > The enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend, > and indeed might be another enemy. It appears to me > that this possibility has been sadly overlooked in US > foreign policy during my entire life.
But, a variation of that principal has been over-applied by the US in it's intelligence work. As a result, the US has been woefully undermanned in human intelligence...as the 9-11 commission has pointed out. Using human intelligence agents usually involved dealing with rather unsavory characters. After the CIA reforms of the '70s, the use of human intelligence was decreased tremendously. Instead of human intelligence, technology was used to gather information. This was seen to result in us being totally unprepared for 9-11 or the war on terrorism. It may take over a decade to develop human intelligence. So, given that we do know that the enemy of my enemy is not always my friend, what do we do? Only use agents who we know with certainty to be uncorrupted. Keep on recruiting only Mormons who never got out of Utah for the CIA? Or do we take risks and gather human intelligence, knowing that we will be mislead some, but at the same time we would have much more capacity to find problems before they, literally, blow up in our face. (Eichmann is of course, a special case, and I think we should have captured him if we could have.) Dan M. _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
