Hoover Institution: Preventing Surprise Attacks: Intelligence Reform in the Wake of 9/11.

STANFORD, Calif. -- In Preventing Surprise Attacks: Intelligence Reform in the Wake of 9/11 (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), Richard A. Posner scrutinizes the new law that governs our national intelligence system, the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004, and finds it wanting.

"My main concern is with the 9/11 Commission's analysis, the only analysis on which the implementing legislation is based; with the commission's recommendations, so many of which ran the legislative gauntlet successfully; and, of course, with the Intelligence Reform Act itself," says Posner. His investigation, however, is not merely an academic exercise. Posner points out that "the President has great latitude in translating its provisions into concrete rules and practices. The act is just the first stage of in the reconstitution of the intelligence structure."

Posner is a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals in Chicago and a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School. He has authored hundreds of articles and nearly four dozen books on matters of public policy, such as Catastrophe: Risk and Response (2004); Breaking the Deadlock: The 2000 Election, the Constitution, and the Courts (2001); and An Affair of State: The Investigation, Impeachment, and Trial of President Clinton (1999).

Preventing Surprise Attacks is part of a series of books edited by Hoover research fellows Peter Berkowitz and Tod Lindberg and published in cooperation with the Hoover Institution.

Preventing Surprise Attacks: Intelligence Reform in the Wake of 9/11
by Richard A. Posner

    ISBN: 0-7425-4947-X         $18.95
    226 pages                   May 2005