This Blogger sums the 911 report up well. Every Bureaucrat wants "More men and money."
The trouble with Harry
I am a bit disappointed that the report of the congressional Joint Inquiry into September 11 takes claims that the "intelligence community" was overworked and underfunded so seriously. The claims may, one supposes, be factually correct, but tell me this: can you name any bureaucracy, in any government department, in any state, on any planet, whose members do not unanimously claim to suffer from a lack of "resources"? In the case of 9/11 the claim has been made indisputable, apparently, by how badly the intelligence services fucked up. They failed--there must have been a budgetary reason.
And yet, on the other hand, there's this weird post facto expectation of outright perfection in intelligence-gathering. The lessons of Pearl Harbor about signal-to-noise ratio seem to have been poorly absorbed. And Congress appears rueful that a "wall" was built in the 1960s and 1970s between domestic policing of the American republic and the gathering of foreign intelligence, because it prevented the relevant agencies from coordinating their data and making the connections (INS-CIA-FBI-NSA) that might have saved the World Trade Center. Well, the people who built that "wall" were perfectly aware that it would have the effect of decreasing the efficiency with which the citizenry was protected. They built it because the power to protect is also the power to detect, persecute, and destroy. The wall serves to prevent a police state being created in America. That's important: not lip-service important, but future-of-the-human-species important. If getting rid of Saddam Hussein was worth American lives, the continued existence of the wall unarguably is. But something there is that does not love a wall--and it's Congress, whose job description formerly included the task of checking and supervising executive power within the United States government.
Yet surely it's not the wall's fault if the highest official in the American intelligence framework can't have a plain-English instruction acted on.
Following the August 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa, the Director of Central Intelligence made combating the threat posed by Usama Bin Ladin one of the Intelligence Community?s highest priorities, establishing it as a "Tier 0 priority." The DCI raised the status of the Bin Ladin threat still further when he announced in writing in December 1998 regarding Bin Ladin: "We are at war... I want no resources or people spared in this effort, either inside the CIA or the [Intelligence] Community."
This declaration appeared in a memorandum from the DCI to CIA senior managers, the Deputy DCI for Community Management and the Assistant DCI for Military Support. The Intelligence Community as a whole, however, had only a limited awareness of this declaration. For example, some senior managers in the National Security Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency say they were aware of the declaration. However, it was apparently not well known within the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In fact, the Assistant Director of the FBI's Counterterrorism Division testified to the Joint Inquiry that he "was not specifically aware of that declaration of war."
Furthermore, and even more disturbing, Joint Inquiry interviews of FBI field office personnel indicated that they were not aware of the DCI's declaration, and some had only a passing familiarity with the very existence of Usama Bin Ladin and al-Qa'ida prior to September 11. Neither were the Deputy Secretary of Defense or the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff aware of the DCI's declaration. This suggests a fragmented Intelligence Community that was operating without a comprehensive strategy for combating the threat posed by Bin Ladin, and a DCI without the ability to enforce consistent priorities at all levels throughout the Community.
It suggests something, anyway: for starters, it suggests that President Bush's immediate response to the catastrophe--overlaying the "Community" with a new cabinet department of Homeland Security--may only serve to worsen the "fragmentation" that blinded U.S. intelligence to begin with. "National Security Adviser", after all, was a cabinet-level position before and remains one now. Is the "homeland" different from the "nation"? How? Will we need to resurrect dead German philosophers to help us figure that one out?
I am trying to imagine these frontline intelligence officers who "had only a passing familiarity" with Osama bin Laden on September 10, well after the USS Cole bombing. Maybe my perception has changed after the fact, but I seem to remember waking up the next morning, seeing the towers in flames on TV, and thinking, somewhere in amongst the holy-shits and sweet-Jesuses, something very like "Well, that crazy son-of-a-bitch Osama bin Laden has to be behind this, doesn't he?" I mean, I wasn't an intelligence agent--just a habitual reader of newspapers and such. I'd have thought taking out a U.S. warship by means of two guys in a powerboat would have gotten someone's attention. Perhaps I knew more about O.B.L., from reading Taki's Spectator reminiscences of seeing good old "Harry" Laden at White's, than the average CIA man did. We must trust that they've learned a thing or two since, and that an infusion of counterterrorism funding has--like a C-note waggled in the face of a stool pigeon, Rockford
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