The folly of relying on the "experts" who are responsible for the National Intelligence Estimate regarding Iran and its nuclear program is again on view. The Principle Deputy Director of National Intelligence, who was integral to the findings of that report and its publication and who has been defending it from criticism across the political spectrum and from around the world (save for Iran, Russia, and China-which reveals a lot about the shoddiness of the NIE report), last week addressed the need to reform our intelligence agencies. Commentary has a priceless quote:

On December 6, Donald Kerr, the PDDNI, that is, the Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence, laid out his agency’s 500-day plan to set things right. “What is required, first and foremost,” he said in congressional testimony, “is integrating the foundational elements and removing the barriers — in the areas of policy, management/budgeting, technology and acquisition, information, collection and analysis, and culture.” To this end, we need “to promote and build an intelligence community (IC) identity or sense of ‘jointness’ by creating programs that provide for cross-agency work assignments and training.”

The 500-day plan enters almost immediately into a discussion of the vital importance of “Equal Opportunity and Diversity.” It offers high praise for the intelligence community’s Diversity Strategy Implementation Workshop, an event held this past October that was an “an important step in the accomplishment of the IC-wide EEO and Diversity Cross-Cutting Emphasis Area Plan (CCEAP) by providing each of the IC Agencies with the mechanisms and direction. . . .”