Roy Godson and Richard Schultz
By David T. Cook
Roy Godson, president of the National Strategy Information Center, and
Richard Shultz, research director of the Consortium for the Study of Intelligence, were Thursday's guests. They discussed a new study of US intelligence methods. Here are excerpts from their remarks:
On the need to focus on the threat from armed groups:
(Shultz) "In the past and today, US intelligence has thought about threats and prepared to work against them as states.... Armed groups are not an ancillary problem, they are a major problem. It requires a different kind of intelligence than we have had in the past."
On the need for intelligence dominance in dealing with such groups:
(Godson) "It is possible to achieve ... intelligence dominance in vital areas of the world. It is something we have not achieved in Afghanistan or Iraq.... The essence of managing the threat and of establishing intelligence dominance is local control [of intelligence]."
On learning lessons from other countries in combatting terrorism:
(Godson) "All the commissions that have met and discussed these matters, very little of their attention has been focused on how other democracies dealt with the problem."
On the US government program that sends suspected terrorists to third countries for interrogation:
(Shultz) "It is not beating people up that is the key to the use of interrogation.... The use of force is seen really as not the way to go. One can use tricks and other kinds of information."
|
RSS feed
