After the CIA's miserable failure to predict the collapse of the Soviet Union, then-Senator Pat Moynihan proposed eliminating the CIA and putting the State Department back in charge of collecting intelligence, as it was before World War II.

Now, after the intelligence community's catastrophic failure on Iraq, Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell is proposing an idea that's nearly as radical: intelligence analysts should talk to bloggers like Juan Cole:

In a new directive that challenges the insular culture of U.S. intelligence agencies, Director of National Intelligence J. Michael McConnell has ordered analysts to cultivate relationships with outside experts “whenever possible” in order to improve the quality of intelligence analysis.

The DNI’s July 16 directive on “Analytic Outreach” (pdf) establishes procedures for implementing such outreach, including incentives and rewards for successful performance.

“Analytic outreach is the open, overt, and deliberate act of an IC [intelligence community] analyst engaging with an individual outside the IC to explore ideas and alternate perspectives, gain new insights, generate new knowledge, or obtain new information,” the directive states.

“Elements of the IC should use outside experts whenever possible to contribute to, critique, and challenge internal products and analysis….”

“Sound intelligence analysis requires that analysts… develop trusted relationships” with “experts in academia; think tanks; industry; non-governmental organizations; the scientific world; …and elsewhere.”

There are a number of reasons why Juan Cole and other bloggers regularly get things right, while the CIA and other intelligence agencies get things wrong.

For one, Cole speaks Arabic and Farsi and reads local news sources, while the U.S. government (U.S.G.) has very few Arabic/Farsi speakers, because so many were purged for being gay or exposing neocon lies.

Of equal importance, Cole isn't part of the U.S.G. bureaucracy and therefore isn't subject to the carrots (like Medals of Freedom for intelligence whores like George Tenet) and sticks (like intimidating visits from Dick Cheney) that result in corrupted intelligence.

Finally, Cole isn't getting paid so he doesn't have to make s**t up to get a check - unlike people like Ahmed Chalabi and Curveball and the bounty-hunters who delivered 90% of the Gitmo prisoners.

But given the obvious advantages of non-corrupt intelligence over corrupt intelligence, isn't it time to revive Pat Moynihan's proposal to eliminate the CIA entirely, and hand intelligence back to the State Department?

Imagine how much better U.S. intelligence would be if it was compiled through a partnership of honest civil servants and honest citizens, both inside the U.S. and abroad - and imagine how much cheaper too.

And to take this thought one step further, imagine how much better U.S. intelligence would be if it was all made open source and crowdsourced? For example, if everyone who cared about the possible threat from Iraq in 2002-2003 had access to all of the information (such as Gen. Hussein Kamel's 1995 CIA debriefing that he had destroyed all Iraqi WMD's after the 1991 Gulf War), it would have been impossible for George Bush to lie the country into invading Iraq.