15 June 2013 –

If they can, they will. 

The U.S. intelligence community collects and stores vast amounts of data on the communications of millions of Americans.  This includes trillions of ordinary phone records, data transfers, and e-mails.  The intelligence community examines that data, gleans some actionable intelligence, and uses it to stop our enemies in Islamic fundamentalist terrorist networks.  On the one hand, this has helped to protect us.      

On the other hand, this practice destroys our individual freedoms.  How did this happen? It was a combination of bad executive decisions and cultural tendencies.  The president’s conceding of the tempo of the war to our Islamic fundamentalist enemies, the technology and methods used to collect, store, and analyze intelligence data, and the “can-do” culture of our intelligence community have created a domestic situation more dangerous to America’s freedoms than are the enemies it was created to defeat.    

Our problems start with our administration’s faulty decisions in the war against Islamic fundamentalism.  No matter what we want to admit, these enemies are at war against us.  Some say that this war has been ongoing for the last thirteen hundred years.  But, today’s Islamic movements don’t have to defeat western sovereign nations’ forces on a traditional field of battle; they have only to garner enough influence in the Moslem community to eliminate western-leaning governments in the Middle East.  They will then be able to create a large enough power base to successfully challenge U.S. influence everywhere.  President Obama’s recent declaration that the war with Islamic terrorists is over is wrong and strengthens our enemies’ position.  The president has conceded the war’s tempo—the timing and the targets for attack—to fundamentalists whose message resonates in the Moslem community that supports it.    

The war is not over.  But, acting as if it is puts the primary responsibility to defend us on our intelligence community and not on our military forces.  The intelligence community must now predict the targets and the timing of all enemy attacks, instead of support offensive military forces to root out and kill the enemy.  This puts pressure on the intelligence community to collect increasing amounts of data, collate it, analyze it, and then pinpoint suicide-bombers, et al, before they attack American targets.  This defensive focus has created a blueprint for intelligence collection abuse.   

It is not surprising that few intelligence community leaders resist their role in the war.  Three decades in the intelligence business revealed certain truths about the community.  If they can collect intelligence, they will want to.  If they want to collect intelligence, they will create enabling policies to do so.  Finally, information will never be destroyed. 

Today, the intelligence community collects, stores, and retrieves levels of information that thirty years ago were simply unattainable.  In 2013, it manipulates electronically generated data at a rate that is thousands of times higher than its best capabilities in 1983.  The U.S. intelligence community can do its collection and analysis job better now than at any time in history.

Because the intelligence community leaders can produce actionable intelligence based on such vast amounts data, they naturally want to do it.  That is the reason they go to work.  Therefore, it is difficult for intelligence community leaders not to embrace the current, wrongly-focused fight.  They are seduced by the importance of their expanded role to a point where they are willing to delve into and collect data on Americans’ daily lives.  They can do it.  They want to do it.  They do it.

Finally, nothing the intelligence community collects is ever destroyed.  The culture has learned that if the information does not apply today, it will apply later.  Past collectors and analysts filled warehouses with such information.   Today, they can carry the Library of Congress in a briefcase.  Imagine what the National Security Agency will be able to store, retrieve, and analyze when it finishes its multi-million-square-foot facility in Alpine, Utah.  This culture is capturing and storing our Fourth Amendment Rights.  Never put something in an e-mail or text that you don’t want the whole world—or NSA—to see. 

In sum, the administration has conceded to the enemy the war’s tempo and timing.  To overcome the effects of this bad decision, the intelligence community, with alacrity, collects information on Americans.  Its then does what it does best and collects ever more data.  Naturally, it will maintain that data, to be used for whatever the administration deems essential. 

Nothing is more corrupt than this situation, and, it won’t even help much to win the war.     

6 June 2013 - 

Quibblers, All of Them! 

When I was a new second lieutenant in the Air Force, my commander, a gray-haired colonel, stood me at attention in his office.  After reading my initial training report, he ordered me to sit down and listen carefully.  His profound lesson on leadership sheds light on why those embroiled in this administration’s scandals are so wrong in what they have done.        

The colonel asked me if I knew what quibbling was.  I said yes, I think so.  He then said that his definition of the word would guide me to be an honorable, trustworthy leader.  He said that quibbling is to not state the whole truth when one’s commander asks a question.  He further explained that quibbling is when one’s statements deliberately do not lead to the complete resolution of an issue. The colonel said that quibblers lurk in a nether world of relativism, where deception and distraction are valued more highly than honesty and forthrightness, where master quibblers abuse public trust for personal or partisan gain.  He said that quibblers are bigger dangers than any outside enemy force.  Quibblers seek power not to protect, but to self-aggrandize.  Quibblers chew at the principles of a free society and at its protecting institutions.   Quibblers get people killed. 

My colonel then told me that the Air Force was his and not mine yet.  His Air Force operated on trust, not on power.  His officers were honorable and truthful when confronted with moral or physical danger.  His officers trusted each other to get the mission done right because they took seriously their oath of commissioning.  His officers placed the mission and their compatriots’ lives ahead of their own lives.  Therefore, if one of his officers did mess up, the only thing that could lessen the inevitable consequences of such misjudgment was complete honesty.  His officers then could accept that their compatriot’s failure was not one of character.  Trust and cohesiveness could be restored.  That was the only way, as well, that the public trust could be maintained.  He stated that he would throw me out of his Air Force if I proved myself to be a quibbler.   

The colonel then ordered me to read aloud my oath of commissioning. 

“I, LeRoy M. Coleman, do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.”

I did not have to look up my oath of commissioning to write it down today.   

I told the colonel I would live up to my oath and never quibble.  He welcomed me to his Air Force and then dismissed me to get back to work.  Over the years, I have seen the damage to the institution caused by quibbling Airmen of all ranks.  I threw out as many of them as I could from my Air Force.        

Everyone slogging in the scandals of Benghazi, the IRS, and the Justice Department took a similar oath to the one I took thirty-four years ago today.  Sadly, every one of them has quibbled about his or her actions and intentions when questioned by Congress.  They all have shown themselves to be sources of rot in our public institutions.  They have shown themselves to care more about deflecting and obfuscating the truth than about right, wrong, honor, or trustworthiness.  They even seem to revel in the “purpose of evasion” of their actions.

As these scandals continue to fester, more Americans are focusing on the rightness and wrongness of their public officials’ actions.  The people’s ultimate question will soon take the form of a moral, not a legal one:  Can these officials be trusted with public policy and monies?  Tragically, my colonel’s demand for honor and trustworthiness among his officers has not been repeated by the leaders of the organizations involved in these scandals.  They all have quibbled.  Good Americans must demand that the administration get rid of these quibblers and that our government institutions follow constitutional rather than partisan principles.  My question:  Will our president rise to the occasion and commit principled action to restore public trust?  Or, will he continue to display himself as the one from whom these corrupt quibblers have taken their cues in the last five years?  Will we, at the end of the day, continue to have a quibbler-in-chief?