A lot of us didn’t think so (see, e.g., me here and the editors here). But the 9/11 Commission, Democrats, and more-government-is-the-answer Republicans like John McCain pressed the Bush administration into agreeing to create the National Intelligence Directorate. (Candidate McCain, in fact, want to create still another agency to “complement” the CIA.) A new inspector-general investigation appears to bear us out. The New York Times reports:

A withering internal report made public on Wednesday criticized the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for bureaucratic bloat, financial mismanagement and a failure to end the turf battles among America’s spy agencies that led to disastrous intelligence failures in recent years.
The report, by the inspector general, was the most detailed account to date of problems that bedevil America’s intelligence agencies more than four years after Congress and President George W. Bush created the director’s office to overcome weaknesses exposed by the Sept. 11 attacks.
It criticized as excessive the amount of time that successive intelligence chiefs have spent briefing the White House and Congress compared with the relatively little time they have devoted to managing a byzantine intelligence apparatus…. [T]he report made clear that many of the goals of the intelligence overhaul in 2005 are far from being realized. While the national intelligence office was created to help streamline intelligence analysis and force collaboration among the Central Intelligence Agency and its 15 counterparts, the report concluded that there has been insufficient progress on either of those fronts.
“This report reads like back to the future,” said Amy Zegart, a U.C.L.A. professor who has written extensively on intelligence matters. “These are the same kind of management and information sharing problems that plagued the C.I.A. before 9/11.”