The U.S. and Global Security Review - Blog by Michael Novakhov

FBI as a domestic intelligence service The American KGB and the Comey's visions: can Hoover's COINTELPRO thugs be transformed into the modern counterintelligence officers? That's the question!  The issue and the problem, it seems to me, is the "change-resistant" institutional culture.  M.N.: The American KGB wants to take over the US government.  Oy, gevalt!  Maybe, it is the time to order a ticket to Madagascar...  “ I believe the FBI should be the leadership factory of the United States government  [God Forbid! We do not need Mike Grimms running the governmental affairs. - M.N.] and it’s not there yet,” Comey said, speaking Sept. 19 at the Intelligence and National Security Summit in Washington, D.C. "I actually think that we’ve reached an inflection point. We’ve hired a tremendous amount of talented people over the last ten years. And now the question is ‘so where are they going?’" M.N.: That's exactly where the problem is: they do

M.N.: The time bomb of terrorism keeps ticking , the Bureau keeps fighting the turf wars and protecting its vested self-interests: money and power . It looks like it is the main issue they care about. Nothing changed in about ten years since these articles were written and the continuing terrorist attacks, large and small, including the San Bernardino , are the best proof of it.  ________________________________________ COMMENTARY Time to Rethink the FBI By   RICHARD A. POSNER Updated March 19, 2007 12:01 a.m. ET The FBI came under heavy criticism last week when it was reported that the agency had failed properly to supervise the issuance of national security letters, a form of administrative subpoena used in terrorist investigations. The bureau, it turns out, was unable even to determine how many such subpoenas it has issued. Just weeks earlier, it was discovered that the FBI had been misreporting the statistics that it uses to track its intelligence

Book Review Countering Terrorism: Blurred Focus, Halting Steps  Richard A. Posner  (Rowman & Littlefield, 245 pp., $22.95) Jennifer C. Gross More than six years after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the federal government continues to respond to the jihad declared against the United States by the radical Muslim terrorist group al Qaeda. One of the nation’s most significant reforms has involved the intelligence community. Responding to concerns that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) failed to anticipate the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, Congress undertook an ambitious reorganization of the community in the Intelligence Reform Act of 2004 to restructure intelligence gathering, analysis, and sharing (National Commission on Terrorist Attacks 2004). Judge Richard A. Posner’s latest book on intelligence community reform, Countering Terrorism: Blurred Focus, Halting Steps, addresses what he sees as the principle challenges facing the intelligence c