An American MI5
Posted by Ilan Goldenberg
Dick Clarke and Roger Cressey argue for a new domestic intelligence agency. I tend to agree. A well developed plan for an American MI5 would simultaneously make us safer while offering more protections for civil liberties.
An independent agency would do a much better job of collecting and analyzing intelligence because it wouldn’t be bogged down in the law enforcement culture of the FBI. The FBI is built around enforcement (i.e. successful prosecutions) not prevention (i.e. intelligence gathering and counterterrorism). The new agency would spend more time preventing an attack and gathering intelligence and less time trying to build criminal cases. Moreover, with intelligence playing second fiddle, most top quality personnel continue to view law enforcement as the best means to advancing their careers and do not enter domestic intelligence. I imagine this problem also has an impact on capital allocation within the FBI.
Like similar agencies in the UK, France, Canada and Australia, the department should have no powers of arrest or detention. Instead it would work with the FBI if a case got to a point where an arrest was necessary. Obviously you’d have to make sure that this relationship was tightly monitored, but generally it would be comforting to know that the agency in charge of arresting people is not the one with the access to all this information on a day to day basis.
Another benefit is that in other liberal democracies these agencies have been more effective at human intelligence. One of the problems faced by the CIA is that it’s almost impossible to penetrate terrorist camps in places like Pakistan and Afghanistan. Penetrating cells domestically and using them to unravel broader international networks is easier.
Anyway, irregardless of the positive impact on civil liberties the public’s gut reaction will be so opposed to this that I doubt it will ever get anywhere. Not to mention the fact that I don’t trust the people who brought us DHS and Guantanamo Bay to implement something this sensitive and complicated. But maybe at some point in the future.
It's a good idea that won't fly. A Congress that gets excited about creating a NID and super intell agency is not going to start thinking devolving dept's is a good idea. There were many smart people saying putting all the intelligence eggs in one basket was a bad idea on myriad levels and yet here we are.
Recall that the 9/11 commission findings were very much supported by the Dems and in fact they made a point in saying the administration was dragging it's feet on the new super intell agency. I'm not sure there is any political power that would favor taking part of the FBI away and making a new agency- especially if the new MI5 like former FBI dept now has to go under the NID.
If the new agency was not doing law enforcement then it would be difficult to keep it in the Justice Dept. Where it goes could become a bigger problem than keeping it under the FBI. The super agencies need to devolve and frankly today the FBI with all it's problems still runs better than some other agencies under DHS. So very good idea, wrong political climate to implement, and extremely problematic current federal structure to fit it into.
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