Bush’s plan for a security shake-up
In a dramatic about-turn, President George Bush has proposed establishing a new department of homeland security that will embrace 22 existing agencies in the biggest shake-up of American security policy since the 1940s. However, some critics are already claiming that the plan, put together to forestall criticism of intelligence lapses at the CIA and the FBI, is half-baked
FOR months the White House had insisted that a new department to co-ordinate America's fragmented security apparatus was unnecessary. Instead, a month after the September 11th attacks that killed around 3,000 civilians, President Bush appointed his old buddy, Tom Ridge, the governor of Pennsylvania, to a new position co-ordinating domestic security from the White House. But with little direct power and not much of a budget, Mr Ridge has not been able to achieve much. Now, facing a barrage of questions about intelligence failures within the government, President George Bush has abruptly changed course.
In a speech on June 6th, he proposed a huge new department that will bring together the Secret Service, the Customs Service, the Immigration and Naturalisation Service (INS) and the Coast Guard, among others. Significantly, the FBI and the CIA, both of which are under fire for failing to act on or share information about some of the terrorists who subsequently went on to participate in the September 11th attacks, remain largely unaffected. Experts wonder whether Mr Bush's changes go far enough.
The White House has insisted that the timing of the president's speech was purely coincidental. Instead, officials have claimed that the plan to create a new cabinet-level department had its genesis in a meeting on April 23rd. This was before a string of revelations that pointed to appalling lapses of co-ordination and investigation by both the CIA and the FBI. A joint House and Senate committee, working behind closed doors, has begun to investigate those failings. And the speech came on the day that Robert Mueller, the head of the FBI, and Coleen Rowley, a veteran FBI agent and whistle-blower, had testified publicly to another Senate committee.
The new department will have a staff of 170,000 and a budget of $37.5 billion, to be transferred from existing agencies. Mr Bush wants to have the new department in place by the beginning of next year, but creating it will require congressional approval.
The initial response from congressional leaders has been mixed. Richard Shelby, the leading Republican on the Senate select committee on intelligence, said plans for the new department did not effectively address the failures of intelligence gathering that were being undercovered. The plan, he added, would have to be carefully looked at by Congress.
From Congress's point of view, one key advantage of Mr Bush's plan is that any new federal department would be subject to congressional scrutiny. Currently, Mr Ridge, classified as an adviser to Mr Bush, is not required to testify before Congress. It appears that an advisory role, such as he fulfils, would still exist. But Mr Ridge, whose exact role has never been clearly defined, does not appear to know where he stands in this new set-up.
There seem to be significant flaws in Mr Bush's plan. It leaves the CIA and the FBI largely to their own devices. One division in the new department is to receive and review intelligence from the FBI, the CIA and other agencies. However, this would not have solved the problem that occurred before September 11th, which was that raw information from FBI agents in the field—whether about a plethora of Middle Eastern students at flight schools in Arizona, or about a curious French-Moroccan trainee pilot who had no interest in learning how to take off or land—did not get filtered into summary reports. Moreover, such a co-ordinating body already exists. The CIA's Counter-Terrorism Centre, created in 1986, already reviews both CIA and FBI reports, but it also failed to “join the dots” before September 11th.
In his speech, Mr Bush continued to insist that “I do not believe anyone could have prevented the horror of September 11th.” Perhaps not. And yet this looks like a bold claim given the evidence of intelligence failures that has emerged over the past few weeks. Perhaps Mr Bush believes that it would be damaging for the intelligence services' morale to have a witch-hunt now. But some reforms are clearly necessary to fix both agencies' bureaucratic cultures and the damaging rivalry—if not hostility—between them.
It has emerged that the CIA had been warned early last year that Zacarias Moussaoui, the French-Moroccan trainee pilot, was an Islamic extremist. And according to a recent report in Newsweek, the CIA had detailed information about two of the hijackers more than 18 months before the attacks. In January 2000, American monitoring of a mobile-telephone number in Yemen, which acted as a switchboard for al-Qaeda, discovered that the terrorist group was about to hold a meeting in Kuala Lumpur. The CIA asked Malaysia's secret services to monitor that meeting. They duly reported back with names and photographs. As a result, the CIA learned that one attendee, Khalid al-Mihdhar, already had a multiple-entry visa for the United States. And it tracked another, Nawaf al-Hazmi, as he flew from the meeting to Los Angeles. These two men later hijacked the airplane that crashed into the Pentagon on September 11th.
The agency says it told the FBI about al-Mihdhar. But this was by way of an e-mail, rather than a formal “take-note-of-this” alert. The FBI could not obtain more information because its database and the CIA's have not been integrated. Nor did the CIA, it seems, say anything about al-Hazmi. It seems clear that the agencies did not take al-Qaeda seriously enough before September 11th. It is not just hindsight that says more attention should have been paid to the Kuala Lumpur meeting. Another man who was there was Tawfiq bin Attash. Nine months later, he probably took part in al-Qaeda's bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen. The CIA found it already had a photograph of him—standing next to al-Mihdhar in Malaysia.
Despite these embarrassing failures, the Bush administration is doing little to address both agencies' shortcomings. Instead, it has publicly praised Mr Mueller, loosened its operating guidelines and allocated the FBI an additional $700m and 900 more agents. But if there are more revelations of the sort that have been fascinating Washington over the past few weeks, the two agencies ought to face real reform. With the threat of another attack hanging over America, Congress and American voters are unlikely to drop their criticism.