Military readiness became a hot button issue during the campaign and rightfully so. But there is another element of American power that has suffered grievously over the Clinton years. In many respects, political interference and increasing ineptitude has made the U.S. Intelligence Community something of a joke. Counterintelligence agents are supposed to ferret out these threats and prevent such terrorist attacks. Intelligence Community spokesmen claim successes in the on-going war with terrorists, but the failures speak for themselves.
Counterintelligence is a tough sell in the United States under the best of circumstances.
By any measure, however, the past eight years have been a disaster. As for counterintelligence, critical CI capabilities were dismantled or starved into oblivion. Access to corporate secrets could save foreign competitors billions of dollars in research and development. But U.S. industries also tried to tap the reservoir of scientific talent in the former Soviet Union and elsewhere. The Russians, for example, developed a number of innovative approaches to solving problems of applied sciences or computer modeling, most of which were applied to military or spy technologies.