Security Blanket

Insight Magazine ^ | July 22, 2002 | J. Michael Waller

[Stand Watch Listen]

June was a busy month for defending Americans against terrorism. CIA Director George Tenet jetted to the Middle East yet again to help Yasser Arafat rebuild his security forces. FBI Director Robert Mueller, describing a reorganization plan to make the bureau a prime instrument against terrorism, "groveled" before liberal senators who wanted him to promise not to profile Arabs and Muslims. The Justice Department and parts of the intelligence community paused, as they began doing under the Clinton administration, to celebrate June as gay and lesbian month.

Meanwhile the White House political office muddled President George W. Bush's no-nonsense proposal for a new Department of Homeland Security (DHS) by continuing to pressure senior administration officials to provide political legitimacy and cover to Muslim groups, no matter how radical their agenda. Again Mueller caved, this time while speaking at the national conference of a militant Muslim organization that felt slighted by the FBI's counterterrorism work — even though the group's leadership openly supports the Hamas suicide-bombing gang and of late repeatedly has refused to denounce Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda. As an embarrassing topper, an FBI spokesman insisted that the group, the American Muslim Council, "is mainstream."

Somewhere in all this, Bush unveiled a plan for a new DHS, terming it the most massive government reorganization since 1947. Was the secretly and hastily prepared plan just one more prop in the administration's counterterrorism repertoire, another grand gesture cooked up by the White House political office to show momentum in the sometimes forgotten war on terror? Some Bush backers, calling themselves increasingly frustrated with the administration's lack of message, wondered. Others said the big initiative was sincere, but not well-planned. Still others worried that its unintended consequences would usher in a new internal-security regime that could become a national secret police.

Close reading of what the president said in his June 18 announcement, study of the official papers and legal documents, and interviews with senior administration officials involved in the DHS conception reveal that the proposed homeland-security reorganization is based on years of think-tank research, legal opinions and policy reviews. But DHS came like a bolt from the blue, catching even senior officials by surprise. Insiders tell Insight the secrecy of the planning and the suddenness of the announcement without meaningful outside debate were choreographed to prevent bureaucratic sabotage. "A brilliant stroke," proclaims a jubilant homeland-security official. "The bureaucracy would have smothered this in its infancy if the White House had let it out."

The president's proposed DHS has four main parts: border and transportation security; emergency preparedness and response; protection against chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapons; and information analysis and infrastructure protection. It does not envision a centralization of federal police powers or new domestic spying functions. Where government investigative and enforcement agencies are combined it is out of concern for the passage of people and goods entering or leaving U.S. territory.

"We are at a time when we face a great danger as a country and as individuals. The government of the United States is asking the people to be brave as we go forth and prosecute this war," says a federal legal expert and Reagan National Security Council veteran who is occupying a new homeland-security post. "There is a time of high danger here at home." But will this exhortation for bravery lead Americans into an Orwellian world? "The trick, of course, will be to do it in a way that respects and does not invade our civil liberties and our way of life," says the experienced homeland-security insider.

That's a big trick, indeed. When faced with the administration's new legal tools to monitor and apprehend terror suspects, civil libertarians tell Insight they are nervous. In a normal war, with clearly defined enemies, formal surrenders or conquests and recognizable signs of victory or defeat, Americans knew that "America would someday return to normal and civil liberties would be restored and repaired," notes Cato Institute defense expert Ted Galen Carpenter. This time, though, the war might be permanent. "That reality makes civil-liberties considerations even more important than in previous conflicts. Whatever constitutional rights are taken from us, or that we choose to relinquish, will not be restored after a few years. In all likelihood, they will be gone forever."

Carpenter was focused primarily on the expansion of Justice Department weapons to hunt down terrorists and prevent attacks. However, to other experienced government hands, the proposed DHS does not appear to be designed to create a mega-police force or American KGB. The DHS would absorb or cannibalize at least 23 government offices and agencies, according to Insight's unofficial count [see sidebar]. The White House's founding legislation, submitted to Congress, states that the primary mission of the department includes "preventing terrorist attacks within the United States, reducing the vulnerability of the United States to terrorism at home, and minimizing the damage and assisting in the recovery from any attacks that may occur."

The new department would have no war-fighting authority. That role would remain with the Pentagon, which is undergoing its own homeland-security reorganization, including creation of a military Northern Command (NORTHCOM), establishment of a new assistant-secretary-of-defense post for homeland security and deployment of a working system to defend U.S. territory against incoming ballistic missiles.

The FBI; Drug Enforcement Administration; Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms; and the civilian and military intelligence community would remain essentially as they are, either as independent agencies or as units of federal departments outside the DHS. The FBI is undergoing a thorough refitting of its own to make fighting terrorism its primary responsibility [see sidebar].

The border- and transportation-security functions of DHS would consolidate key domestic-security and law-enforcement agencies responsible for borders, seaports and airports — essentially, for everything and anyone who enters or leaves the United States. The idea, an administration homeland-security architect tells Insight, is "to pull these together and find synergies among them by collocating them under a common leadership, to bring about the priority needed for the missions, to do a better job screening people and goods coming in and out, in a way that brings the counterterrorism part of the mission into the forefront."

Once moved into the DHS, for example, the much-maligned Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), which is responsible for screening foreigners entering the United States, would have a much better counterterrorism focus under direct supervision of security-minded leaders. According to the DHS architect, "This will be a hard task. Each agency has its own training, standards and practices. Everything's very stovepiped. The tough part will be to take advantage of the agencies' collocation to get them to communicate horizontally." No one with whom Insight spoke denies this process could take years.

Emergency preparedness and response, the second main duty of DHS, absorbs the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), domestic-preparedness and emergency-support offices of various other agencies, as well as the Strategic National Stockpile of vaccines and medicines. Under the president's proposal, elements of the Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency can be placed under DHS direction in connection with an actual or threatened terrorist attack or other major emergency.

"FEMA has been so neglected and under-resourced and disengaged from the national-security side that putting it in a new department is an opportunity to give it the necessary level of attention and resources, and the role for which it's chartered," one of the reorganization architects says. "Under the Reagan administration, unseen by the public, FEMA had a strong national-security capability for preparedness to deal with the consequences of a war at home. All of that was lost when the Soviet Union came apart, and that side of FEMA was simply abolished. Now we're back to needing this kind of capability, and putting FEMA in a new department offers the opportunity to get there."

The third major part of DHS confronts the prospect of the detonation on U.S. territory of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). Under direction of an undersecretary for chemical-, biological-, radiological- and nuclear-weapons affairs, DHS would develop technology to detect and prevent such attacks, while also developing a common, governmentwide architecture for development of sensors, countermeasures and related technologies.

The Pentagon now focuses on such development, but its products are for war-fighting purposes that are not immediately applicable for a domestic, civilian environment. Similarly, many civilian applications of defensive WMD technology are useful for battlefield purposes, so under the present system WMD solutions for homeland security fall between the cracks. "There's a policy coordinating committee under the HSC [Homeland Security Council] as an interagency activity, but nobody is really seized with responsibility for budgets, granting contracts and so forth, as it's just interagency coordination," says a senior administration official. "The new department will get really serious about R&D [research and development] there."

Which brings us to the fourth main part of DHS: information analysis and infrastructure protection. As envisioned by the president, DHS would have a strong army of analysts to study intelligence gathered from across the government, and to connect the dots where previously no such analytical body existed. That means combining foreign intelligence gathered by the CIA and National Security Agency(NSA), military intelligence processed by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and domestic information and intelligence collected by the FBI, other federal agencies and state and local law enforcement.

The infrastructure-protection part of the equation would be to develop ways and means of defending the nation's critical infrastructure — the networks of communications systems, energy distribution, transportation facilities and the like — from terrorist attack.

Of course none of this is cheap. As a nation, the United States will have to face up to whether it is willing to invest the dollars to fund new research and development for sensors, protective gear, vaccines and antidotes, hardening of critical infrastructure components and other technologies needed to ensure homeland security. So far, no political figure has offered such leadership. President Bush is trying to carry out the reforms on the cheap, telling the public the entire transformation won't cost the taxpayer an extra penny. Some in the Pentagon fear that the administration and Congress will raid the defense budget. Despite recent increases, Pentagon insiders see the budget as being far below the levels needed to carry out the ongoing transformation of the armed forces and the new costs of fighting terrorism worldwide.

Even so, national-security specialists tell Insight they are relieved to learn that the planning for the DHS was not as hasty as it seemed from the outside. Within weeks of the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush created a Homeland Security Council, modeled after the National Security Council as an interagency coordinating and advisory body, and headed by former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge. A congressman prior to being elected governor, Ridge did not distinguish himself as a national-security hawk. Former Reagan operatives remember him as a "swing vote," at best, on issues such as fighting communist terrorism in Central America, and as the No. 1 House Republican against deployment of ballistic-missile defenses.

But Ridge appears to have benefited from years of extensive homeland-security research and debate by a range of outside groups that offered an array of off-the-shelf proposals the administration seems to have borrowed. A congressionally mandated commission led by former senators Gary Hart (D-Colo.) and Warren Rudman (R-N.H.) anticipated major terrorist attacks on U.S. territory and called for creation of a Department of Homeland Defense well before the events of Sept. 11. Bush's plan also shows the fingerprints of a series of homeland-security and related reports prepared by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), an independent think tank, under the general direction of veteran journalist Arnaud de Borchgrave with grants from Pittsburgh philanthropist Richard Mellon Scaife. And it should: Bush's special assistant for Homeland Security, Frank Cilluffo, was day-to-day manager of the CSIS studies and is regarded by professionals as one of the best-informed and most forward-looking thinkers on the issue.

Supporters of the president are divided on the idea of a DHS. The Heritage Foundation has issued positive assessments of the plan, calling it "a much more comprehensive and far-reaching proposal than similar recommendations made by the Hart-Rudman Commission or congressional legislation offered over the past year." The administration initiative "should result in new efficiencies, not new bureaucracies," according to policy analyst Michael Scardaville of the Heritage Foundation.

Others aren't so sure. Timothy Lynch, director of the Project on Criminal Justice at the conservative/libertarian Cato Institute, tells Insight, "I don't think it's a very good proposal. It seems to have been cobbled together very quickly. The fact that it doesn't include the CIA and the FBI shows it wasn't a fundamental reexamination of the way the federal government is going to address terrorism. The president should have been thinking in much more fundamental terms."

Lynch favors combining federal agencies while narrowing their missions and jurisdictions, enabling the federal government to carry out its antiterrorist work while checking against expansions of big-government power. "As it is, it's impossible to have oversight of all these agencies," Lynch says. "That leads to all sorts of uncorrected abuses. It's a big improvement in civil liberties if we have just one federal agency. That way we can keep an eye on it."

The American Conservative Union has blasted the initiative as a huge new government encroachment on civil liberties. But Lynch doesn't see a trampling of civil rights under the president's DHS proposal. "I don't think that the proposal of homeland defense by itself, at least from what I've seen so far, raises those kinds of problems. Maybe the devil is going to be in the details. We'll have to see what [DHS] is going to be doing differently from the agencies that make it up. I don't see any dramatic civil-liberties concerns."

In a town where personnel is policy, some connected Washingtonians are scratching their heads. "I'm still wondering why nobody has been fired," says terrorism expert Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute. "Why is the director of Central Intelligence still at his post? Why is the Clinton-appointed head of the FAA [Federal Aviation Administration] still at her post? Why are the various directors of the myriad counterterrorist groups still there? Why has there been no shake-up at FBI, CIA, DIA or the NSA?"

Indeed, with all the ineptitude and poor leadership demonstrated by so much of the national-security community, many in Washington tell Insight, they too wonder why heads haven't rolled. Some of the most serious security problems have been discovered and addressed only because field officers blew the whistle. One of the big problems with the president's proposal, national-security experts say, is that it would criminalize the very whistle-blowing that brought so many dangers to light — dangers that even FBI Director Mueller has credited with forcing major changes for the better.

The administration appears to recognize the personnel problem, White House insiders say, even if it has not moved against senior officials. Bush proposes a flexible civil-service system for DHS that would allow the new department to hire personnel on an emergency basis, while weeding out ineffective employees. Labor unions and congressional liberals, including Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) and Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.), have pledged to fight the flexible personnel provision.

Administration officials still seem to be running scared of some of their Senate foes. In a June appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee, as a Washington Times editorial noted, Mueller "groveled when liberal ideologue Sen. Russell Feingold [D-Wis.] demanded that he condemn commonsense use of 'profiling' (in other words, tighten the security screws on Middle Eastern men at airports)." Homeland Security chief Ridge assured Sen. Kennedy that his reorganization plans would not undermine the unions.

It is hard to say whether the groveling to the left is worse than the potential for harm to civil liberties. Lynch and others worry that without effective oversight the DHS, like any bureaucracy, will spin out of control over time. At the same time, there's a risk that congressional oversight will become so out of control that it could hamper the new department's antiterrorism mission. No fewer than 88 House and Senate committees and subcommittees claim jurisdiction over some aspect of homeland security, portending a nightmarish logjam for any administration security official trying to do his job — and a potentially dysfunctional annual budget appropriation and authorization process.

"Congress must match the president's vision and leadership by reorganizing the congressional committee system," Scardaville says. That's a huge sacrifice to ask of the 535 politicians on Capitol Hill, and especially of many of the 88 chairmen who find the status quo to be an ideal way to hop on the gravy train and channel federal pork to their districts in the name of homeland security.

Cannibalizing the Government

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is envisioned to absorb all or part of at least 23 government offices and agencies. Though redundancies would be reduced, most of the absorbed agencies, such as the Customs Service and Coast Guard, would retain their distinct identities. The administration plans to organize DHS into four main divisions, plus special categories for the Secret Service and liaison with state, local and international organizations. The four main DHS divisions are listed below, with the agencies they would contain. The current parent agencies appear in parentheses:

Border and transportation security: U.S. Customs Service (Treasury Department); Immigration and Naturalization Service (Justice Department), U.S. Coast Guard (Transportation Department), Transportation Security Administration (Transportation), Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (Agriculture Department) and Federal Protective Service (General Services Administration).

Emergency preparedness and response: Federal Emergency Management Agency (an independent agency), the Office for Domestic Preparedness of the Office for Justice Programs (Justice), the National Domestic Preparedness Office (FBI/Justice), Domestic Emergency Support Teams (Justice), the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Public Health Emergency Preparedness (Department of Health and Human Services, or HHS) and the Strategic National Stockpile of medicines and vaccines (HHS). Elements of the Department of Energy (DOE) and the Environmental Protection Agency, such as DOE's Nuclear Incident Response Team, could be called into DHS as an organizational unit in connection with an actual or threatened terrorist attack, major disaster or other emergency.

Chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapons: Select agent registration-enforcement programs and activities (HHS); "certain relevant programs and activities" of the DOE, including the Nuclear Emergency Team; the National Bio-Weapons Defense Analysis Center (Department of Defense); and the Plum Island Animal Disease Center (Agriculture).

Information analysis and infrastructure protection: National Infrastructure Protection Center (FBI, except for the Computer Investigations and Operations Section), National Communications System (Defense), Critical Infrastructure Assurance Office (Department of Commerce), Computer Security Division (National Institute of Standards and Technology), National Infrastructure Simulation and Analysis Center (DOE) and Federal Computer Incident Response Center (General Services Administration).

The U.S. Secret Service, a part of the Treasury Department dedicated not only to protecting executive-branch leaders, leading presidential candidates, visiting foreign dignitaries and foreign embassies, but also to fighting counterfeiting and other financial crimes, would be transferred under the plan into DHS as its own stand-alone unit.

FBI Reprioritizes

Big changes are under way at the FBI, which already is bruised and bleeding from inept handling of major terrorism and espionage cases, and the worst case of treason in its history. "The events of Sept. 11 marked a turning point for the FBI," says its director, Robert Mueller, who took office just a week before the massive terrorist attack. "After 9/11 it was clear that we needed to fundamentally change the way we do business."

In Mueller's words, "new threats to the nation require a redesigned and refocused FBI." No longer will the FBI wait for terrorist attacks in order to bring the guilty to justice. Mueller's reorganization plan makes fighting terrorism the bureau's No. 1 priority, with crime-fighting a secondary duty. In a recent report to Congress, he outlined the FBI's 10 new priorities, in order of importance, indicating a shift from a reactive to a proactive orientation:

1. Protect the United States from terrorist attack.

2. Protect the United States from foreign-intelligence operations and espionage.

3. Protect the United States against cyberbased attacks and high-technology crimes.

4. Combat public corruption at all levels.

5. Protect civil rights.

6. Combat transnational and national criminal organizations and enterprises.

7. Combat major white-collar crime.

8. Combat significant violent crime.

9. Support federal, state, local and international partners.

10. Upgrade technology to perform the FBI's mission successfully.

Source: FBI

J. Michael Waller is a senior writer for Insight magazine.

[habaes corpussel]

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