NICHOLAS X. RIZOPOULOS
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associated services, have generally done very well at protecting the
country." He also claims that its "great successes in thwarting previous
terrorist attacks are too easily forgotten." I, for one, remain highly skep–
tical of the CIA's vaunted efficacy. (True enough, the FBI's own recent
[rack record has been even more alarming.) Nor do
r
find Betts's "vari–
ation on a theme by Roberta Wohlstetter"-the old saw about crucial
information regarding the impending attack on Pearl Harbor "getting
lost in a crescendo of 'noise"'-parricularly convincing in this instance.
Now Betts is nobody's fool. To the contrary, he has for many years
been one of the most sensible and best informed academic commenta–
tors on national security issues. And, sure enough, much of his general
argument, about intelligence "reforms that should have been made long
ago," is sound-even if unexceptiona
I.
Don't assume, he says, tha t
throwing more money in the CIA's lap will by itself do the trick. "Mar–
ginal improvements" are the best one should hope for. Besides, the "way
to
improve intelligence is
to
do better at collecting important informa–
tion." "Human intelligence is key.... More and better spies will help."
Better and deeper analysis of collected information is also badly needed.
So, too, is institutional reorganization-in Washington and Langley–
involving "the integration of information technologies, management
systems, and information sharing." And so on. And so forth. But what
does any of this really mean? Does Betts actually believe that any of
these reforms will actually come about in the near future? I suspect he
does not. And yet we are encouraged to conclude that all is well in this
best of all CIA worlds.
On the other hand, Gregg Easterbrook pulls no punches in dissecting
the state of U.S. airport and airline (non-) security prior to September
I I:
"Every element of the U.S. airline industry was designed to maxi–
mize passenger miles and minimize costs.... Flight safety ... was taken
seriousl y.... Secu rity was a n afterthought." Worse yet, "complacency
Ihadl also set in .... More generally ... a theory had arisen that ter–
rorist organizations had lost interest in attacking airliners." Yet, writes
the author, it need not prove impossible to devise much better security
measures, both on the ground and in the air, if money were no object.
Among the measures recommended: on the ground, better trained per–
sonnel at check-in stations, more efficient machines inspecting all lug–
gage, better cooperation and coordination with well-armed police units;
on the airplanes, transponders that cannot be turned off, impregnable
cockpit doors, armed sky marshals on all flights (following the EI AI
model). Since we are talking about
25,000
flights taking off each day
just within the United States, sky-marshaling "could cost several billion
