The Intelligence Red Herring
By Larry Johnson on January 7, 2010 at 6:35 PM in Current Affairs
First I’ll give President Obama credit for a solid speech that is certain to staunch the bleeding in his public support caused by his heretofore ham-handed handling of this incident. He provided a measured, stern declaration and, regardless of whether he meant it, did say those magic words, “the buck stops with me.” That’s what Americans expect of their President.
Now the bad news. The speech and the review of the incident are emphasizing the wrong issue–the failed Christmas day underpants bombing was not an intelligence failure or a failure to connect the dots. The folks making this charge know nothing of intelligence and, no matter how well intentioned, are going to gum up the intelligence community.
The real problem is the absence of a universal, standard system for detecting explosives at passenger security screening checkpoints. We do not have such a system in place and there is no magic, silver bullet solution on the horizon. It appears that Obama tacitly acknowledged this problem and is prodding the TSA and the National Labs to do something. But to come up with a genuine solution will require a Manhattan style project.
Over the short run the Feds should require all airports to install and use a combination of trace detector and bulk explosive detector systems at passenger screening checkpoints. This should be accompanied with a CAPPS-style program of passenger profiling This is an interim fix but is better than the non-system currently in place.
Here’s the danger with the President’s recommendations today. From here on out every tidbit of possible intel will be thrown into the hopper. There is no incentive now for an analyst to exercise any judgment. Every threat will be treated as a red alert. That’s not a problem if you are only dealing with a hundred threats a month but that’s not the case. The intelligence community is going to be flooded with threats. The system will be overwhelmed and instead of creating a more responsive, more collaborative process, we are going to wind up with the intel community equivalent of the “Boys Crying Wolf.” There will be people running in a thousand different directions and, not surprisingly, the real threats will once again slip between the cracks.
The expectation for perfect, timely intelligence is like the quest for the Ark of the Covenant or the Holy Grail. It exists in theory but it is not a reality. Even in the case of Umar Abdulmuttalab the intel community was in the process of compiling the information. There is no indicator when this information first comes in that puts the analysts and their managers on alert. In fact, let’s recall that the responsibility for compiling this information was taken from the CIA and a new layer of bureaucracy created with the creation of the National Counter Terrorism Center aka NCTC. That “shrewd” move made intelligence less agile not more.
It would be nice to have timely, accurate intelligence. But I would not bet our nation’s security on that fantasy. The best defense is a good defense. In other words, an integrated, over lapping system that incorporates mulitple technologies, profiling and the ability to ping key databases. I can’t tell based on today’s opaque presentation whether that is the course of action to be pursued.
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