Deciding who will get draw lots among the crew to rearrange deck chairs on the Titanic
From today's Washington Post comes this clarion call from AG Ashcroft:

Attorney General John Ashcroft assured the committee that the CIA and FBI, which under Bush's proposal would not be part of the new security agency, would fully share the intelligence they gather. "For the first time, America will have under one roof the capacity for government to work together to identify and assess threats to our homeland," he said.

With all respect to the AG, "one roof" must include all agencies of the government, since the intel agencies "would not be part of the new security agency..." (emphasis added).

It's good that they will now be, somehow, required to "fully share the intelligence they gather". And, oh, just in case you had any doubts of this outcome, another headline from today's Post: Panel Finds No 'Smoking Gun' in Probe of 9/11 Intelligence Failures. Whew. For a while, I didn't know if I could stand the suspense -- the Congress, that has hamstrung the intelligence agencies since Sen. Frank Church's vendetta in the 1970s, might otherwise have had to look in the mirror.

Dear God, this is what passes for bold leadership after our intelligence failures? Hence the headline here. These people in Congress and the administration are not serious; they are organization men and are at least two steps away from actually arranging those deck chairs, when what they should be doing is correcting the known deficiencies in the front-line agencies.