Ted Gup

About the author: Ted Gup, a former investigative reporter for the Washington Post and Time, has covered the U.S. intelligence community for the past twenty years.

The CIA should be radically reformed or abolished. As evidenced by the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on America, the CIA is incapable of responding to modern threats to America's national security. The agency still uses the information-gathering techniques that it utilized during the Cold War, but these techniques are no longer effective because America no longer faces just one major enemy and its sphere of influence. The United States must now respond to multiple threats from various rogue nations and the individual terrorists those nations harbor. An additional problem is that new agency recruits are unqualified and unwilling to infiltrate Middle Eastern nations, from which the most serious terrorist threats...