Strengthening Constitutional Self-Government

No Left Turns

Saturday Musings

Lots to talk about this morning, including Charlie Cook's National Journal article about how Democrats have made a serious miscalculation about health care. Cook shoots pretty straight on politics--will Democrats listen?  I'll come back to this later.  The more arresting piece I just stumbled across is Herbert Meyer's American Thinker article on "Why Intelligence Keeps Failing?"  

Some background first.  I always sit up and read Meyer with special interest.  In the fall of 1983, Meyer, then vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council within the CIA, wrote an extraordinary, 8-page single-spaced memo to director William Casey titled "Why The World Is So Dangerous." Remember the time: the Soviets had shot down KAL 007, and we were on the cusp of installing our medium range nuclear missiles in Europe.  Unknown to the public, we had a serious war scare in the early weeks in November.  In the midst of this, Meyer wrote that "If present trends continue, we're going to win the Cold War."  (You can find the whole memo, now declassified, at this CIA site: just type in "Herbert Meyer" in the search window, and the document will pop up a few places down on the list.)

So what does Meyer say now?  Sample:

There isn't a chance that these clowns will come up with the right answer, because they're the problem.  Simply put, the reason our intelligence service keeps failing to connect the dots is because the officials in charge don't know how.

Meyer is on the same track as my graduate school teacher about intelligence matters (Harold Rood) that intelligence is much more a matter of political insight than social science, and hence that intelligence cannot be conducted by a bureaucratic process.  

Read the whole thing, as the blog saying goes.




Discussions - 1 Comment

thanks for the Meyer link. His short essay on how to analyze information will be invaluable for many teachers: https://www.howtoanalyzeinformation.com/

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