Washington’s summer circus has opened early, and is already
playing with the President’s proposal for a Department of Homeland
Security. Hearings will soon begin, and popcorn should be sold in
great volume. In Ring One, we’ll have Gov. Tom Ridge trying to duck
questions from the predictable libs about whether the new
department will spend its time eradicating racial profiling at
airports. The flower children want to make sure the new agency is
politically correct, even if that means it can’t do its job. They
want us to continue to strip-search every blue-haired grandma
before she gets on an aircraft while avoiding any offensive conduct
toward Middle Eastern males between the ages of 17 and 40. In Ring
Two, you’ll see OMB director Mitch Daniels trying to explain to
senatorial porkmeister Robert Byrd (D - W.Va.) why the headquarters
of the new department shouldn’t be located in Morgantown. In Ring
Three, unnoticed by the media, the Armed Services and Intelligence
committees will be hearing from some people who want to fix the few
things that really are wrong with the plan.
The President’s plan is trying to deal with a thousand problems
at once. We have to change the INS, the Customs Service, the Coast
Guard, FEMA and the Border Patrol to make sure they are no longer
just tax collectors and law enforcement agencies. The nature of
these agencies has to be changed, and they have to be grafted onto
the national security apparatus. Border security is just an up
close and personal version of how we deal with threats that live
farther away.
Right now, border security is a dangerous joke. Hundreds of
thousands of illegal immigrants come here every year. We only
search about 2 percent of the 5 or 6 million truck-sized ship-borne
containers that enter American harbors each year. You could put a
dozen large nukes in any one of those containers. Since 1996, armed
Mexican troops and police, escorting smugglers and illegal aliens,
have entered the U.S., and the Border Patrol apparently is under
orders to not shoot even when shot at. The INS is still handing out
visitor and student visas without any real control over who is
coming or where they’re going. Can anybody tell me just why we’re
still letting people in from any of the terrorist nations?
Congress will try to pick the proposal apart and add a pile of
pork. The legislation will be veto-proof because it’s the
President’s highest priority. Mr. Bush is going to have to dedicate
a chunk of his own time to making sure the nonsense is minimized.
Equally important is the stance Mr. Ridge takes when he is called
to testify on the legislation. He must say clearly that things like
racial profiling will be used if needed. If we need to stop issuing
visas to anyone coming from North Korea, Iran, Iraq or, for that
matter, Saudi Arabia, that’s just fine. Agreeing to political
correctness now means defeat later.
We’ve given Gov. Ridge a hard time — which he deserved — for
his seemingly unserious color-coded view of terrorism. But Ridge is
a good tough guy and his job, up to now, was only ceremonial.
Congress needs to get Gov. Ridge going with the authority to fix
what’s so badly broken. But before Congress does that, there’s one
really big problem that has to be solved.
When you add bits of intelligence information together, the
whole is often greater than the sum of the parts. What’s wrong in
our intel community is that most of the addition is never done. The
intelligence information that now is gathered by the FBI, CIA, NSA
and a few other agencies that can’t even be named, isn’t pooled and
centrally analyzed. What A knows is usually kept from B, who may
know something that makes the two more valuable together than
apart. What we must have is the fusion of intelligence information
and analysis in an operational context. We have to establish a
central group of experts to analyze and integrate all the
information we gather. Their reports would be based on the results
of pooling the information and analyses. But they should only
report based on the advice, and with in the context of the views of
the FBI field agents, the CIA antiterrorist operatives and the
Defense Department Special Ops guys. Then, and only then, the
results could be boiled down into a series of findings on which the
President and others can base their decisions. But the president’s
proposal doesn’t do the job that way.
Under Mr. Bush’s plan, the new Homeland Security Department is
in charge of analyzing and fusing together all of the intelligence
from all of the agencies, and then making policy decisions on what
to do with it. Because it provides no role for the operational guys
in this process, the plan is fatally defective. You must have your
operators and analysts working as closely together as possible. The
President’s plan requires that they be farther apart, not closer
together. Ivory Tower analysts of the new Department will be in no
position to analyze the intelligence or decide what should be done
with it because they will not be sufficiently immersed in
operations.
We do need a consolidated homeland security agency rolling up
INS, Customs, Border Patrol, Coast Guard, and FEMA, into one. Even
more, we need a Joint Agency Task Force, centralized in the CIA,
for all intelligence analysis and dissemination of product to the
civilian and military operational agencies. Knock down the legal
walls between the CIA and FBI to let them cooperate on domestic and
foreign intelligence operations, and join them at the hip with
military intelligence like NSA and others. But keep the analysts
close to the operators. The Joint Agency Task Force should include
intel and operational guys from all three military services, who
would have responsibility to work with operational planners, not to
give them orders.
Mr. Bush’s plan is a generally a good one, but the intelligence
fusion and operational concerns have to be done differently to
work. We don’t need a year of Congressional dithering over it.
There’s already talk of waiting until the Intelligence Committees
finish their investigation to act on Mr. Bush’s proposal. It will
be September 11 again before that is finished. We can’t wait that
long.
