perfidy

Various news sources are reporting today that President Bush is planning to accept two of the main recommendations made by the 9/11 Commission, namely the creation of a national head of intelligence and the establishment of a counterterrorism center to track specifically terrorist threats.

Great ideas! Several years too late, but great ideas. As a small-government liberal walking oxymoron, I tend to distrust the creation of cabinet-level positions (can we axe HUD, Labor, and Homeland Security tomorrow?), since the immediate problems they are meant to cope usually subside within a couple decades leaving the attendant bureaucracy hanging around like a very expensive third nipple. The Department of Labor, for example, was probably years too late in coming when it was established in 1913, since widespread labor unrest, internal labor-force migration issues, and worker-safety problems were decades-old bugbears at that time. But nearly a hundred years later, with its major work done, couldn't the office be retired and its important continuing operations (such as labor standards and worker safety or government contract administration) be folded into Interior or HHS?

By this same token, although the creation of a cabinet-level internal intelligence position made sense in the dark days of 2001, it is ultimately a bureaucrat's solution to the problem. Who but a bureaucrat could decide that the best way to cut down on bureacratic inefficency is to create a whole new, bigger org chart? Nothing against Tom Ridge, who has done as good a job as anyone probably could in a terribly difficult job, but everything the public sees about the Department of Homeland Security from the very name of the thing down to the street-level antics of the TSA and the constant gestures toward total surveillance is, so far, a crass and unfunny joke.

In my humble and fully-informed-by-hindsight opinion, what's being done now should have been done in the first place, leaving faintly ridiculous discussions of "Homeland" out of it. (side note: homeland. My "homeland," technically speaking, of NE Ohio, is already perfectly well defended by the tens of thousands of private gun owners. My "homeland" of Massachusetts is equally so. We're not all peace-loving Kucinich voters here.)

Of course, this brings up a question. Last night I saw on the news that the President doesn't want to make the "Intelligence Tsar" a cabinet post, because the office will need to remain independent from White House influence. Great idea, and good on W for taking that step. However, being the good tinfoil hatter I am, I would also like to see some concrete and simply worded language blocking this new office from becoming an American NKVD. (n.b. I didn't say Gestapo on purpose.) Many Americans distrust government authority when it shows up on their Main Street, and the last thing we need is another reason to keep that up.