CONGRESSIONAL ALERT: 9-11 Commission, Seven Lessons of History Worth Noting

Proposed Sponsor: Government Operations/Government Reform

Shared Jurisdiction: Appropriations, Armed Services, Commerce, Foreign Relations/

International Affairs, Governmental Affairs/Reform, Intelligence, Judiciary

Other Beneficiaries: Agriculture, Budget, Energy, Environment, Finance, Health, Small Business

Bottom line: It’s not about money. Creating a Smart Nation requires that we reconceptualize “national intelligence” as a “Smart Nation” instead of spies and secrecy. The Open Source Agency will simultaneously strengthen national security, public diplomacy, and commerce, while also providing the national network to internationalize education, reduce business risk, and bring us all together.

OSS CEO REVIEWS LESSONS LEARNED FROM OPEN SOURCE INTELLIGENCE, GLOBAL WAR ON TERRORISM, AND NATIONAL SECURITY TRANSFORMATION—AMERICA AT RISK

Washington, D.C., July 30/PRNEWSWIRE/ -- According to Robert David Steele Vivas, CEO of OSS.Net, Inc., former spy and author on intelligence reform, “As Congressional hearings on the 9-11 Commission Report begin, it is helpful to remind ourselves of a few essential lessons learned over the past few decades.”

“LESSON 1: National intelligence was flawed by design, gets worse with every fix, and will never be healthy until it is independent of White House political influence and under professional management.

“LESSON 2: It’s not about money. We spend $50B a year on secrets that produce less than 20% of what we need to know, and less than $250M on “open sources,” the other 80% of what we could but do not know.

“LESSON 3: You cannot have smart spies in the context of a dumb Nation. America has lost touch with global reality, in part because of the growing divide between people with power and people with knowledge, and the equally terrible divide between people with power and the people doing the work.

“LESSON 4: There is no “Global War on Terror” (GWOT), but there is a 100-year six-front war of terror against civilization. Despite the best efforts of the Armed Forces, what we are doing now is going through the motions. We don’t have the intelligence, the strategy, the force structure, or the long-term inter-agency and coalition campaign plan to survive, much less prosper.

“LESSON 5: Transformation, as Will and Ariel Durant explain so well in their “Lessons of History,” only happens in the mind, not in the bureaucracy. Not only will the bureaucracy not produce transformation, but neither the Republican nor the Democratic parties are transformative—they are both “status quo” powers.

“LESSON 6: The whole really is greater than the sum of the parts. National intelligence as spies and secrets is inherently a stupid concept. Only the creation of a Smart Nation, one that integrates all seven tribes of intelligence including those in the private sector, will preserve security and enhance prosperity.

“LESSON 7: Americans need catastrophic failures to wake up. 9-11 was not enough. There is more pain to come.”

Congressional creation of the Open Source Agency will help America.

SOURCE: OSS.NET

-0- 07/30/2004 /CONTACT: Robert David Steele Vivas

703-242-1700, /Web site: www.oss.net and

http://www.oss.net/extra/news/?module_instance=1&id=2573