Untangling Anti-Terrorist Confusion? Lots of Luck

Wall Street Journal ^ | July 27, 2004 | GEORGE MELLOAN

[OESY]

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All this sounds plausible on the surface. Bring all these cats and dogs under one master. Maybe they will do a better job than they do now of communicating with each other, so that the sum of their knowledge about terrorism suspects can be acted upon. This would require a massive upgrading and linkage of their separate and often appallingly obsolescent computer networks. But who knows, maybe with enough new organization charts one of these days the government will get itself organized.

But one wonders. A new department, Homeland Security, was created under Secretary Tom Ridge only two years ago. It already has spent $70 billion and wants $40 billion more next fiscal year, notes Forbes magazine. The DHS is hard at work, organizing better security for nuclear plants, arranging point-of-origin certification of shipboard containers, asking banks to monitor transfers from places like Saudi Arabia. But Forbes still rates these risks at the "yellow" level and gives a high-risk "red" to the threat of computer network hacking.

The Patriot Act has broken down a key barrier to the effective use of intelligence to nab terrorists: The "wall" erected by the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to separate intelligence gathering and domestic prosecutions. Interpretations of FISA by the Clinton Justice Department and FISA judge Royce Lamberth caused the information flow between intelligence and law enforcement to wither, says the 9/11 report.

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It wasn't that the U.S. had no defenses. It has many thousands of law enforcement officers at all levels of government and as many as 20,000 people in the CIA alone. But all of these people, many of them very able, were trapped in a morass of government bureaucracy.

Some of the restrictions are mind-boggling. Most big cities in the U.S. have "sanctuary" ordinances, pressed on them by "civil rights" groups, which prohibit city employees, especially the police, from checking with the Immigration and Naturalization Service on the immigration status of anyone who runs afoul of the law. As a result, thousands of illegal aliens are at large in the U.S. and encounter no trouble with the INS even if they are picked up for theft or drunken driving. And of course, airport screeners, under the same "civil rights" pressures, are barred from "profiling" passengers and thus, in the words of one critic, must accost a "blue haired 70-year-old woman with an aluminum walker" and nine other average travelers for every able-bodied 30-year-old Mideast male.

The INS also has little coordination with the overseas consular offices of the State Department, which approve visas for visitors to the U.S. The State bureaucracy is responding to homeland security fears by tightening up on visa grants, but with no evident system for distinguishing between possible terrorists and innocent students, business travelers and the like. The CIA's failure to insert spies into al Qaeda was a major shortcoming. One wonders what it does with its estimated $40 billion budget.

Congress is itself fragmented, politically polarized and mired in the oversight methods of yesteryear, and so is not up to the requirements for legislating a more streamlined and efficient defense against terrorism. For example, Secretary Ridge has had to testify to 80 committees and subcommittees since taking office. What they do with all that duplicative information and how he finds time to do anything else is a mystery.

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