David Warren on the absence of profiling in the intel labyrinth

The gist of it is that in the 106 months since the terror strikes of 9/11, more than 3,000 government and private contractor organizations have sprung up or been re-sprung from previously existing, to address questions of homeland security. They now operate from 10,000 locations across the U.S., and the better part of a million people now have top-secret security clearances to work in them. In Washington alone, over this time, 33 new building complexes have been or are being erected to further this task, with aggregate floor area three times that of the Pentagon. More than 50,000 intelligence reports are generated each year.

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...with a much smaller security establishment (even proportionally), and much less invasive techniques, the Israelis have a far better record for stopping terrorists dead in their tracks. And this, only because they shamelessly profile their lethal enemies.

When "politically correct" attitudes prevail, we get not only vast bureaucracy, but also, the real bad guys slipping through highly visible cracks. Nor is this situation improved when budget cuts follow and the cracks widen.

Moreover, at the very top, intelligence findings, such as they are, take the back seat to political calculation. Every major U.S. intelligence finding over the last decade, including "weapons of mass destruction in Iraq," has been dead wrong. In turn, the celebrated, very public 2007 finding that the Iranians had given up their nuclear weapons program, was delivered for no other plausible purpose than to cut the legs out from under President Bush before he started another war. The next, corrective one, showing Iran indeed still working on it, will be designed to help Obama make a case for tougher sanctions.

In other words, truth is seldom among leading criteria in the final assessment of this "intelligence" ocean; for bureaucracies have other priorities, the chiefmost being their own survival and growth.