Posted on 01/14/2004 9:23:09 PM PST by Happy2BMe
Terror Watch List Buried in Bureaucratic Mess The Terrorist Screening Center, which opened under the aegis of the FBI on Dec. 1, 2003, "is not quite fully functional," Department of Homeland Security Undersecretary for Information Analysis and Infrastructure Protection told United Press International. Libutti declined to give a date when the center - designed to integrate the plethora of lists of terror suspects held by different agencies of the U.S. government -- would be up to speed, but Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge said earlier this year that it would be fully functional "by mid May." That deadline is the latest in a series of undertakings made by officials on this vexed issue, which has become something of a running sore for the administration - and a rich vein for critics of the president's record on homeland security to mine. Democrats blamed the lack of progress on a failure of leadership from the White House, but officials pointed out that the task was complex and difficult, and said they were moving ahead as quickly as they could with a groundbreaking project. But the absence of what Attorney General John Ashcroft has called a "one stop shop" for information about terror suspects has risked exposing the United States to ridicule abroad. During the recent orange alert, with the country, and especially international aviation, braced for a feared terrorist attack, more than a dozen flights headed to America were held up by authorities after U.S. officials said they had received "specific, credible intelligence" about threats involving those routes. Some flights were canceled altogether, and others delayed for hours on end while officials checked passenger lists for names of suspected terrorists. The delays were so long, says British Airways Chief Executive Rod Eddington, "due, in part, to the fact that a total of 22 different agencies claimed a reason to check one passenger list." Officials from the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and the Transportation Security Administration all said they could not refute or contradict Eddington's statement. "That's not unexpected... British Airways would have the best records (of who needed to see their passenger manifest)," said Rachael Sunbarger, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security. She added "Extraordinary circumstances call for extraordinary measures. We acted with an abundance of caution to protect air travelers and the American public." Rep. Jim Turner, D.-Texas, the senior Democrat on the House homeland security committee - who has been briefed by officials -- said he was disappointed to learn that the screening center had not been used to check the identities of passengers on suspect flights during the orange alert. "You would have thought that the first thing you would have done was ... taken the suspicious names off the passenger list and immediately run them through the terrorist screening center. But we're told the terrorist screening center was not consulted." Calls for the integration of the 12 so-called watch lists - databases of people thought to be terrorists or connected with terrorists - held by nine different federal agencies, date back to the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993. Officials pledged action following the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, when it emerged that two of the hijackers should have been on a CIA watch list, but this was not known to other agencies, or to local law enforcement officers. In July 2002, the president's National Strategy for Homeland Security committed the administration to "build and continually update a fully integrated, fully accessible terrorist watch list," incorporating both biographical information - like name, date and place of birth and nationality - and biometric data - fingerprints, photographs and the like. But work has progressed slowly. The national strategy placed responsibility for integrating the watch lists with the FBI, but in April, 2003 - nine months later -- a General Accounting Office report found that there had been almost no progress and that data from the 12 lists was still not being shared. That month, Ridge - to whose newly formed Department of Homeland Security responsibility for integration had been transferred after it briefly resided at the White House - told a congressional panel that, although he could not give "a specific time frame," his officials were "fairly close to finalizing the consolidation." Finally in September 2003, the White House announced that it was transferring responsibility back to the FBI, who said the consolidated list would be based at the Terrorist Screening Center, which would open Dec. 1. But as of mid-December, Turner said, less than 20 percent of the more than 50,000 records that were expected to be in the center's database when it was complete had been integrated, and names from only three of the 12 watch lists were included. He said that the absence of an integrated database that could be accessed in real time by federal, state and local law enforcement officials "severely handicapped" the fight against terrorism. Without a comprehensive list of terror suspects, he added, a whole raft of other anti-terror initiatives -- like the border screening program called U.S.-VISIT and the passenger threat rating system known as CAPPS II - would be greatly limited in their effectiveness. "At its heart, the (screening center) is the fundamental tool that has to be used by all these other initiatives," he told reporters in a conference call from Texas. Officials said that the task of integrating the 12 lists was immensely complex. "Each of these lists was maintained by a different agency, for a different purpose," Ed Cogswell, a spokesman for the FBI, told UPI. "There were different criteria for getting on to them, different information about the individuals was held." For example, passengers who have assaulted airline staff whilst drunk might be on the no-fly list, alongside suspected terrorists. Libutti told UPI that some of the lists might also contain bad data, which would further slow up the integration process. The task, he said, was "not only integrating (the lists) but quite frankly cleaning them up" to remove "persons of interest" who might have been wrongly placed there "for all the right reasons." One former senior official involved with setting up the center said it had been necessary to design "a single formalized process with common criteria" for adding names. As part of this process, the former official said, the names would be "vetted by operational entities" - the Terrorist Threat Integration Center in the CIA for foreign terror suspects and the FBI for U.S. ones. "They will basically be finding out who these people really are, and getting all the identifying data we can," in an effort to reduce the number of false positives, the former official explained. False positives occur when someone not a terrorist or a terrorist suspect is flagged by the database because of having the same or similar name. During the orange alert, three names from an Air France passenger manifest identified as suspect by U.S. authorities turned out to be a young child, an elderly Chinese restaurateur and a Welsh insurance salesman - none with any connection to terrorism. In a letter to Turner the congressman made available to the press, FBI Assistant Director Eleni P. Kalisch explained that there was now a single "nomination process" with guidelines for all federal agencies that might want to add names and a process by which individuals could seek to correct bad information about themselves and names added in error could be removed. Turner said that center personnel had indicated to Democrats they needed more staff. There were only 28 people working in the center, he said. Cogswell said the center was fully staffed, but then added, "There is the intent to bring additional people on board." Another reason for the delay, officials say, is the need to develop a mechanism that would give state and local law enforcement officers access to enough information to check out their suspicions on a traffic stop, for example, without compromising classified portions of the database. "Think of it as a multi-drawer filing cabinet," said the former senior official, "some people have keys to only certain draws." Finally, some have suggested that the technological challenges in bringing together several large databases indexed in different ways and held in different software programs have been hard to overcome. But Turner blamed the White House for the slow progress, citing repeated promises of action from the administration, and saying that the FBI was the fourth agency to be placed in charge of the task. "This responsibility ... has been passed around at least four different times among four different federal agencies," he told reporters. "In my judgment, the technology is available, what we've seen is a lack of leadership." He said he had asked the GOP chairman of the committee, Rep. Christopher Cox, R.-Calif., to hold hearings on the subject in order to "vigorously exercise our oversight responsibility." A GOP congressional aide said Cox was considering the request. Eddington, in an op-ed published in the Financial Times, said that British Airways was "working with the U.S. government to streamline this process in future." Homeland Security officials - whilst emphasizing that they stood by all their actions during the alert - confirmed that they were working to ensure things would run more smoothly if events repeated themselves. "Secretary Ridge has met with British officials," said Sunbarger, "we've been having conversations with them about how to streamline this process."
Copyright 2004 by United Press International
By SHAUN WATERMAN
Jan 14, 2004, 08:15
The United States still does not have a fully functioning "one stop shop" for checking the identity of suspected terrorists and more than 20 agencies were scrutinizing passenger lists on at-risk flights from Europe during the recent orange alert, according to officials and airline executives.
FBI: Jews need not apply for Arabic linguist jobs - Thread 1
FBI: Jews need not apply for Arabic linguist jobs - Thread 2
And they did so on tax payer's time at tax payer's expense.
Gotta love this country. Especially if you're an avid terrorist fan.
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