Free Custom «The Need for Intelligence» Essay Paper

To justification of the need for intelligence in U.S. and elsewhere, exploring the treats to the state and to the nation is extremely important. This is because they can have direct penalties even to the being of the country. Threats to national security over a relatively span of time reduce the quality of life of the inhabitants of a state. Significantly, it threatens to narrow the range of policy choices available to the government.

According to Buzan, there are five main threats: military, political, societal, economic and ecological, and the main measure that defines them as issues of national security is their intensity. Intensity would include the threat’s specificity, its nearness in space and time, its probability, the weight of its consequences and whether or not perceptions of a particular threat are reinforced by previous experience. There is no distinction between foreign and domestic threats, but it is acceptable that political, societal and economic threats are more likely to characterize the main sources of a domestic threat. All these threats have, as a result, the demand for intelligence services capable of confronting them and protecting a country’s interests with total success.

 

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Therefore, intelligence is necessary for at least four major reasons. First, to avoid strategic surprise, as the salient goal of any intelligence community, is to watch carefully threats, events and developments that have the ability and intent to harm the nation’s existence.

Second, intelligence is also necessary because through intelligence, creating long-term expertise is easier, especially for national security issues in which a great deal of knowledge and experience exists in that community. A consensus on basic national interests and an enduring framework can be created so that even the short-term policies can be compatible. Third, intelligence is essential because it supports the policy process, as politicians always need timely intelligence, which will provide information and warning of risks and benefits for issues of national security. A fourth reason for intelligence is to maintain secrecy. Without such secrecy, nation’s needs are always subject to breach of security. Secrecy makes intelligence special and unique for its services to society.

According to these four essentials, a huge difference does not exist between peacetime and wartime, and there is no clear distinction between those two periods for intelligence, even though many people believe there is. The materials that will be gathered through intelligence process determine a country’s stance on national security because the first purpose of the intelligence community is to protect the nation at all times.

Conclusion

Undoubtedly, terrorists never accomplish their ultimate goals. Truly successful anti-terrorist policy vastly reduces and eliminates the amount of violence. Fortunately, over the past years, the violence in U.S. decreased, but contrary to the other terrorist groups, 17 N; a terrorist group, still continues to murder even while in decline. This is true because sophisticated nature of the terrorist groups made it very hard for the security services to intrude and defeat. When difficult economic measures were adopted and crises with U.S. occurred, terrorists used these problems as an excuse to strike.

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Admirably, during the war against the terrorists, the U.S state overcame the temptation to restrict civil liberties and to transform the nation into an undemocratic police state. Likewise, in a democracy, statutory regulation of the media’s coverage of terrorism is neither feasible nor desirable, so media self-restraint and self-resolution were the best policy options when the political elites were unable to agree on a common definition of political violence and the political environment became so polarized. This led to an incoherent approach to countering terrorism.

The U.S. police and the intelligence services, with significant technical and advisory help from British colleagues, successfully regained some of their credibility after being purged in the aftermath of the military dictatorship.  The fact that multiple crises did not lead to a major threat to the democratic institutions could be judged as a sign of democratic consolidation and a sign of a healthy democracy within U.S. society. Problems, which could have possibly materialized, especially in a new democracy because of the kind of intelligence services operations undertaken, hopefully will never become part of United States normal political life.

During the transition from an authoritarian regime to a democratic regime, two functions of intelligence that are beyond its jurisdiction and legality, exist: counter intelligence and covert actions. These are extremely important and usually create many serious problems for democratic institutions concerning their legitimacy and abuse of civil rights. U.S. leadership, fortunately, in pursuing these terrorist groups exercised these options with virtually no abuse of democratic ideals.

“Counterintelligence” refers to efforts taken to protect one’s country intelligence operations from penetration and disruption by hostile nations or by their intelligence services. The other important function is “covert operations.” Highly important and sensitive is the legitimacy of such operations and whether these operations should be assigned to intelligence services.

Covert operations are designed to produce a result in a foreign country secretly. In general, there are three main categories of covert action. The first is propaganda that includes the unethical exercise of influence through the media to spread false rumors. The second is political action in which funding or other kinds of support to political parties, unions etc., take a significant and active role in a foreign country. Due to the above reasons, I think United States are right to warranty 9/11 report.