Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes, Turn and Face the. . .Cheese?

In light of the new look here at federalcheese, I have been considering changing the content as well. Maybe not completely, but more serious topics might bring me a wider audience and more lively debate. There will still be my frivolous posts about all the boring aspects of my life and hopefully it will stay (start being?) funny. Well, here goes. One of the most pressing issues facing the United States is our intelligence gathering. It should not come as a surprise to anyone that we are lacking in this category. Our government’s usual solution to problems like this one is to have Congress allocate about a billion dollars, focus the media for a week or so and move on. But money isn’t the issue. How does the United States gather intelligence, vital information necessary to stop events like 9/11 and the London bombings, without creating more terrorists in the process? We okay the mistreatment of prisoners in the attempt to gain more information, hoping to save lives, but is it working? Does the government really believe Guantanamo Bay is helping the cause or do at least a few in the Bush Administration see it as detrimental? It seems as if our intelligence community missed the boat and never quite made the move away from Cold War spying and into the Middle East. Who’s to blame? Is anybody to blame? We need to start building constructive relationships with the leaders of Middle East countries in order to gain access to the threats that lay within them. But, we need to recognize the problems these leaders perpetuate at the same time, issues such as the suppression of human rights. I’m not saying it’s going to be easy, but I would like to hear people’s thoughts on this.