A Letter from the Editor

Insight on the News, Oct 22, 2001 by Paul M. Rodriguez

Dear Readers,

In the mad dash to identify and eliminate terrorists worldwide, one thing has been overlooked. And it is not whether to invest the money to do the job. Rather, it is how much money actually is needed considering the outrageous waste of money already appropriated. Blame is going around aplenty at the FBI and CIA, among others. But let's also consider the oversight failures by Congress.

What brings this to mind is something a friend told us recently about the ability to collect vast amounts of information via electronic means. "You ever wonder what happens with all that data?" this person asked. "There's so much that comes in that it's impossible to sort through it all," let alone analyze the significance of information and how it fits into the larger picture.

In the movie Field of Dreams, Kevin Costner's character is told that if he builds it they will come. In his case "it" is a baseball diamond in the middle of a cornfield and "they" were baseball fans. This required creating an infrastructure to handle all aspects of the much-heralded game beyond a field: stands, parking, sanitation and food to name but a few necessities. The same is true for security and intelligence fields. What good is it if you've got a nifty satellite and superdooper computers if humans can't step up to the plate and use their talents of deductive reasoning to let a ball fly past or hit a home run?

Kelly Patricia O'Meara's cover story is an eye-opener on a variety of fronts, including the role of Congress in overseeing how tax money is spent. While virtually every aspect of government is scrutinized to the umph degree, many programs in the intelligence and security arenas are not. A "trust me" platitude too often assuages the overseers when, in fact, they should be digging deep to know for sure that the quality of programs past have been well managed.

It's like Diana Ray's investigative analysis: The devil is in the details.

Until next week then, God bless.

Paul M. Rodriquez Managing Editor