Bob Barr

Don't Be Fooled;
A Green CIA Won't Root Out the Terrorists
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
May 16, 2007

They didn't predict the fall of the Soviet Empire. The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 caught them by surprise. But never fear, Congress has now directed that officials at the Central Intelligence Agency keep watch on global warming so we are not taken by surprise if the calamity foreseen by Al Gore causes a spike in temperature in the future.

Congress, now under new management, apparently has concluded that the CIA has far too much time on its hands trying to follow, anticipate and help thwart terrorist attacks. It seems that spending our nation's foreign intelligence resources trying to figure out what lies behind Vladimir Putin's beady eyes, or trying to pierce the wall separating North Korea from the civilized world, are all less important than the intelligence community's latest congressionally mandated responsibility.

In the 2008 intelligence authorization bill, just passed by the House of Representatives, the directorate of national intelligence or "DNI" (also known as the "intelligence czar") has a new job—to develop within the next nine months a top-level paper laying out the "anticipated geopolitical effects of climate change and the implications of such effects on the national security of the United States." Whew. Sounds like another "Inconvenient Truth" as the former vice president and global warming seer might say.

The mandated global warming study was pushed into the intelligence authorization bill by the House intelligence committee's new chairman, U.S. Rep. Silvestre Reyes (D-Texas). This is the same Reyes who, earlier this year in an interview just prior to taking the helm of the intelligence committee, couldn't accurately relate to a reporter the differences between the various warring factions in Iraq.

Perhaps in an effort to make up for that earlier phenomenal lack of basic knowledge about the one country in the world in which U.S. taxpayers are spending billions of dollars each week, and in which nary a week goes by without multiple deaths of American soldiers, Reyes has decided to stake out the new cutting edge of intelligence work.

Unfortunately, during the committee's debate on whether to include the global warming mandate in the legislation, the chairman showed as little understanding of this issue as he possessed earlier on Iraq. After stating publicly that global warming was indeed an area in which the United States might be "vulnerable" to "terrorists," U.S. Rep. David Dreier (R-Calif.) inquired of the chairman if he really believed that "a terrorist could impact global climate change?" The chairman answered decisively, "we don't know."

Rather than Congress focusing on streamlining the CIA and the other components of our sprawling intelligence community, and reducing rather than increasing the myriad tasks for which it bears responsibility, this latest effort is a giant step backward. Unfortunately, it is not the first foray into the scientific miasma that is global climate change analysis.

During the first Clinton administration, the subsequently disgraced CIA director, John Deutch, in perhaps the ultimate feel-good bureaucratic move, formed the director of the Central Intelligence Environmental Center. Human and fiscal intelligence resources were for years thereafter wasted in the study of volcanic eruptions, migratory fish patterns, shrinking ice caps and air pollution. If perhaps those intelligence analysts had been directed instead to study patterns of terrorist behavior rather than climate patterns, our government leaders might have been not quite so surprised at what happened on Sept. 11.

Perhaps also Reyes and his many Democrat colleagues who voted to divert intelligence resources to the study of climatology, were impressed with a report just issued by a panel of former active-duty military officers under the auspices of the "Military Advisory Board" of the CNA Corp., a nonprofit research group. This report, entitled "National Security and the Threat of Climate Change," formed the basis for at least some of the testimony that supported the inclusion of the global warming mandate in the intelligence bill this month. Among other observations contained in this private-sector report, was the notion that climatologic problems in areas of the world such as Africa and the Middle East will turn them into "breeding grounds" for terrorists.

Well, guess what? These areas of the world already are "breeding grounds" for terrorists. And they are likely to remain so for the foreseeable future, regardless of whether Al Gore's "Inconvenient Truth" is proved or disproved in the centuries to come.

Perhaps it will take another multimillion-dollar study and countless wasted hours by dozens of high-paid analysts for the CIA to realize that the Marine barracks in Beirut was not bombed because of a drought, that the warlords in Somalia did not decide to murder and desecrate the bodies of American Army personnel because they weren't getting enough rain, and that the terrorists on Sept. 11 did not kill thousands of Americans because they were upset with our country's unenthusiastic response to allegations of global warming.

Unfortunately, while the Democrats in Congress are busy greening the CIA, our real, human adversaries are out there plotting against us. The weather will be the least of our worries.

Bob Barr occupies the 21st Century Liberties Chair for Freedom and Privacy at the American Conservative Union Foundation.