Retired Army Lt. Gen. William E. Odom, head of the eavesdropping National Security Agency from 1985 to 1988, contends that Americans have "less security than we had before" the 9/11 attacks
From the Congressional Quarterly...
CQ HOMELAND SECURITY – INTELLIGENCE
Dec. 16, 2003 – 8:10 p.m.
Spies: More Than Two Years After 9/11, the Dots Remain Farther Apart Than Ever
By Jim McGee, CQ Staff
The Department of Homeland Security was born of a wound so deep that many of the nation's civilian leaders in Washington believed they had a once-in-a-century chance to impose fundamental change on a national security establishment that even before the 9/11 terrorist attacks was known for its intelligence failures.
"The tragedy of September 11th may, at long last, serve as the catalyst for action to implement meaningful and sustained reform within the Intelligence Community," said Eleanor Hill, staff director of the joint inquiry by the House and Senate intelligence community into the 9/11 attacks, during a hearing on Oct. 3, 2002.
The passage of the Homeland Security Act (PL 107-296) the following month was hailed as a bold, paradigm-shifting leap that would impose discipline and coherence on the sprawl of turf-conscious forces of counterterrorism, much as the National Security Act of 1947 had done with military intelligence after the surprise Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
"This department will unite dozens of federal agencies behind a single mission: protecting the American people," President Bush said on Nov. 25, 2002, upon signing the Homeland Security Act.
But a CQ Homeland Security review that traces appropriations through thousands of pages of budget records, public testimony and agency documents shows that something very different from the "meaningful and sustained reform" of counterterrorism intelligence has come to pass.
Instead of unifying the key agencies with tighter management and streamlined coordination of their analytic centers, technology, budgets and personnel, the record shows that Congress and the Bush administration did the opposite: They collaborated in adding new layers of duplication, cost and bureaucratic overlap to an already bloated system.
Powerful Forces at Work
Three powerful and enduring Washington dynamics converged to produce a result so at odds with what the framers of the Homeland Security Department intended: hastily drafted appropriations bills, authorization bills studded with duplicate legal authorities for different departments, and the fierce entrepreneurial drive of the agencies and their champions in Congress and the Bush Cabinet.
As a result, the responsibility for counterterror intelligence is now splintered among four big, rival centers of bureaucratic power and influence: DHS, the Justice Department (including the FBI), the Defense Department (including the National Security Agency), and the CIA. The Big Four are all pursuing nearly identical forms of growth, adding intelligence centers, hiring analysts by the droves and investing huge sums in advanced intelligence technology systems.
Even loyal supporters of the Bush administration in Congress fret over what's happened.
"Post-September 11 reforms were intended to consolidate and unify intelligence-gathering, analysis and enforcement," said a recent report by the Republican-led Senate Appropriations Committee. "Instead, we now have more agencies and organizations in the counter-terrorism game than ever before."
The result: a much more complex counterterrorism intelligence system, with new computer systems exploiting the numerous post-9/11 laws that, beginning with the anti-terrorism law known as the USA Patriot Act (PL 107-56), dramatically expanded the government's lawful access to previously privileged records.
Data Overload..........
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