How Not To Counter Terrorism (by Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity)

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via TomPaine.com:


How Not To Counter Terrorism
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
June 20, 2007



The following memorandum by the steering group of the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity is signed by Coleen Rowley former FBI special agent; Larry Johnson, former CIA analyst; former counterterrorism manager, Dept. of State; Tom Maertens former NSC Director for Nonproliferation; former Deputy Coordinator for Counterterrorism, Dept. of State; Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst.

On June 6, 2002, former FBI Special Agent Coleen Rowley testified before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary about the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 and how the FBI could do a better job detecting and disrupting terrorism. Time magazine had acquired (not from Rowley) a long letter she wrote to FBI Director Mueller listing a string of lapses in the month before 9/11 that helped account for the failure to prevent the attacks. As painful and embarrassing as it was after such tragedy to unravel the mistakes, Rowley insisted that the unraveling was necessary in order to address effectively the threat of further terrorist attacks. Her VIPS colleagues asked Rowley to review what has happened in the five years since her testimony, and we have contributed to this memorandum. In what follows, Rowley outlines how the primacy given to PR and other political factors has encumbered still further the FBI’s ability to deal in reasonable and effective ways with the challenge of terrorism.

Given the effort that many of us have put into suggestions for reform, how satisfying it would be, were we able to report that appropriate correctives have been introduced to make us safer. But the bottom line is that the PR bromide to the effect that we are “safer” is incorrect. We are not safer. What follows will help explain why.

Wrong-headed actions and ideas had already taken root before that Senate hearing on June 6, 2002. Post 9/11 dragnet-detentions of innocents, official tolerance of torture (including abuse of U.S. citizens like John Walker Lindh), and panic-boosting color codes, had already been spawned from the mother of all slogans—“The Global War on Terror”—rhetorically useful, substantively inane. GWOT was about to spawn much worse.

Within a few hours of the Senate hearing five years ago, President George W. Bush reversed himself and made a surprise public announcement saying he would, after all, create a new Department of Homeland Security. The announcement seemed timed to relegate to the “in-other-news” category the disturbing things reported to the Senate earlier that day about the mistakes made during the weeks prior to 9/11. More important, the president’s decision itself was one of the most egregious examples of the doing-something-for-the-sake-of-appearing-to-be-doing-something-against-terrorism syndrome.

As anyone who has worked in the federal bureaucracy could immediately recognize, the creation of DHS was clearly a gross misstep on a purely pragmatic level. It created chaos by throwing together 22 agencies with 180,000 workers—many of them in jobs vital to our nation’s security, both at home and abroad. It also enabled functionaries like the two Michaels—Brown and Chertoff—to immobilize key agencies like the previously well-run Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), leading to its feckless response to Hurricane Katrina. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2007/06/20/how_not_to_counter_terrorism.php