Outsource the CIA to Downsized Reporters

A MODEST PROPOSAL

By Ron Rosenbaum

It’s rare that one is able to solve two profoundly troubling societal problems with one quick fix, but I feel I’ve done it! Well, in a metaphorical, Swiftian, satirical “Modest Proposal” way. I suspect that most Slate readers will be aware that Jonathan Swift’s 18^th-century “Modest Proposal” to solve the Irish famine by encouraging starving parents to eat their children was meant as satire, right? Because when I ran my own modest

proposal by a journalist friend, she took it a little too seriously, and heatedly informed me, “That’s the worst idea I ever heard!” That’s sort of the point! When things are bad, the only way to make the situation crystal-clear is to show how difficult it would be to come up with an idea that is ludicrously worse.

On the other hand, as they say in cheesy movies, “Sounds crazy, but it just might work!”

So: My modest proposal to solve America’s “intelligence” failures is to fire the entire CIA and our other many tragically inept intelligence agencies and outsource all intelligence operations to investigative reporters downsized by the collapse of the newspaper business. Thereby improving our “intelligence capability” (it can’t possibly get worse!) and giving a paycheck to some worthy and skilled investigative types—yes, some sketchy, crazed, paranoid (but in a colorful, obsessive, yet often highly effective way) reporters who once made the journalism profession proud, exciting, and useful, not boring stenography for the power elites.

How bad are things in U.S. intelligence? I refer you to a Jan. 20 Reuters report on the Congressional investigation into the failure to “connect the dots” on the Christmas bomber: the guy who—as just about everybody in the world except U.S. intelligence knew—was trying to blow up a plane. Why? (read more here)