Reduce bureaucracy for better intelligence gathering

Re: “ ‘Sabotage’ Part 1 — The CIA goes to war with the Pentagon,” Exclusive, July 16

Rowan Scarborough has it backward. The CIA isn’t declaring war on the Pentagon. It’s the other way around.

When Congress passed the National Security Act of 1947, it wanted a “central” civilian-run intelligence agency that would bring together the best minds and technology to track and analyze world events. Although the leadership of the CIA has performed poorly in recent years, the agency’s operators and analysts have consistently gotten their facts right on terrorism and Iraq.

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We never needed the many additional bureaucracies created within the Pentagon by figures like Douglas Feith, or a new office for a director of national intelligence. Today, instead of one “central” intelligence agency, we have 16 — most of them headquartered under the Pentagon’s roof.

Even with attacks like the one Sept. 11, 2001, al Qaeda has never had the capability to destroy the United States. We’re destroying ourselves with too much government, much of it financed by borrowing. Nowhere is that more evident than in the “intelligence community.”

If intelligence is to be effective, we must reduce the size of the bureaucracy that produces it. The place to start is the Pentagon.

Robert F. Dorr
Oakton

We need more roads to preserve our mobility

Last Thursday, it took only two wayward vehicles to stop all movement south for the whole evening from Alexandria almost to Fredericksburg. Commuters and others were deprived of their constitutional right to mobility mainly because of a refusal to build alternate roads.

Are Quantico Marine Corps Reservation, Prince William Forest Park, and the Occoquan River so sacred as to preclude any road through, forcing us to detour all the way to state Highway 28 or even U.S. 15? Are Fort Belvoir’s two golf courses strategically essential?

When Patrick Henry asked: “Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, that it is to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?” he was addressing the price of human life, not the lives of trees that would have to be removed to build a road.

Yes, commuters like their parks and their dead-end streets, but how many roads would have to be closed to imprison you? How much have your road and street patterns raised the cost of your utilities? How much have they impeded your police, fire, and ambulance services?

Any entity needs a circulatory system, so build more roads!

Milt Lindner
Alexandria

Appointed members of NVTA raising our taxes

On July 12, the Northern Virginia Transportation Authority voted to impose $300 million in new, regressive taxes on the residents and businesses of Northern Virginia.

Never mind that the voting members of the authority (including Alexandria Mayor Bill Euille) had never been elected to that particular body. And never mind that Virginia voters rejected a similar tax hike plan in 2002. “No taxation without representation” is a slogan we usually see on D.C. license plates. Now it also pertains to Virginia.

Bud Miller
Alexandria Taxpayers United