sobering thoughts

a.k.a. enough about the web site revisions already...



weather: cool but pleasant

music: The Smiths - Singles Collection

mood: shocked, sadly

file under: ?



Made the mistake of taking a break for lunch while watching the The Newshour on PBS. Luckily I did not lose my lunch, but it wasn't easy watching. They've had coverage of the 9/11 Commission and analysts talking about the proceedings. Every time I hear about what happenned - or what didn't happen, or what HAD to happen before things changed - I feel the same sad, frustrated anger boil up within me. John Lyton is right - anger is an energy, although I can get too saddened to motivate myself forward in the face of impenitratable organizations.



Being an ex-civil servant I know I shouldn't be surprised by the ability of a bureaucracy to be tangled, a la boa constrictor, by its own internal politics, petty turf rivalries and generalized organizational incompetance, but it still rattles me to hear it, and even more when I hear others discuss it. Sure, hindsight is 20-20, but the missed opportunities of the intelligence community does make it hard to hear by those who analyze the situation from an information management point of view. The failure by whomever it is - the organization? the heads of it? whomever - eventually undermines the work of those within the bureaucratic structure at the FBI and CIA who do put the hard work in, who do fight the good fight, who do try and make the world a safer place. In the end, you have to wonder what year we're living in - we're talking about a organizational structure that has a backlog of intelligence data untranslated because it doesn't have enough Arabic translators. A language spoken by millions of people on the earth, and it doesn't have enough translators. A more sad irony could not be found. Perhaps there's no shortage of intelligence in the war on terror - perhaps it's sitting on someone's desk wanting to be translated.



My mum often quotes Santayana's famous creed that 'who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it'. When I was with the Provincial government in Ontario, I remember printing out an excellent article . Without going into too much analysis about intelligence failures, you'd do well to read that one article. I'd read it every once in a while to remind myself to keep the same passionate search for truth as my guide during my time as a civil servant. Somedays when I have to ask myself what year we're living in, and how organizations can operate blind to that very truth - well, then I wonder what good that passion is really for.