Homeland Insecurity in the Age of Bush

Do you feel safer than you did in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks? If so, you must have been living in an awfully swell cave. (You didn't happen to see a tall, beared guy with a headscarf and a Kalashnikov, did you?)

The fact of the matter is that President Bush has been unable to keep his lofty post-9/11 promise to reform America's long dysfunctional intelligence agencies. Some of that is not his fault and some of it is.

* It is not the president's fault to the extent that the rot in the CIA, NSA and FBI long predates his tenure and even the tenure of his father as a past CIA director and president.

No leader no matter how committed and dynamic could have been expected to make sweeping changes in these old boy networks that would transform them in a few short years.

* But the president is neither a committed nor dynamic leader and it is his fault that the changes have been so insignifcant, that he has appointed an appalling rogues gallery of political hacks and other partisans to key homeland security posts and repeatedly bowed to powerful benefactors in the ports, chemical, rail transport and other key industries in backing away from homeland security reforms.

In other words, put politics ahead of your safety. (Congress has been a willing helpmate. See the story of "The Well-Dressed Caribou" below.)

One of Bush's few praiseworthy moves was to name John Negroponte as the first director of national intelligence, but he is now leaving after less than two years to take a lesser post as Condoleezza Rice's deputy secretary of state. (As it was, Bush resisted creating a post of intelligence overseer just as he resisted creating the 9/11 Commission.)

The reason for Negroponte's departure from such a key job after such a short time is unclear,
although it might indicate that the State Department, marginalized in the run-up to the disastrous Iraq war, is getting some clout back. Or maybe Negroponte was simply tired of intelligence community infighting.

In any event, that is beside the point because five years after the 9/11 attacks, America remains deeply vulnerable to another big hit and from available evidence its intelligence agencies have made only modest steps to detect, let alone prevent, an encore performance.

To wit:

A FAILURE OF IMAGINATION

The obsession of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) with preventing copycat 9/11 attacks has led to significant steps such as reinforcing aircraft cockpit doors and screening for weapons and bombs, but there has been little coherent analysis on what form future attacks might entail.

This is called "risk management" in the real world. DHS, the folks that brought you the disaster that followed the Hurricane Katrina disaster, apparently remain inured to that real world.

THE WELL-DRESSED CARIBOU

The fires at the World Trade Center had barely been extinguished when Congress approved the first homeland security funding, and shock of shocks, the allocation of monies had little to do with actual need.

Under the original scheme, homeland security funds were equally distributed among all U.S. states, including crucibles of terrorism like Wyoming, which happens to be our carpetbagging vice president's adopted state.

This mischief resulted in Wyoming getting $37.74 in anti-terror dough per capita, which meant that every caribou could be issued a biohazard suit, while the Northwest Arctic Borough, an area in Alaska inhabited by 7,300 people, spent $233,000 (or $31.91 per capita) to buy decontamination tents, night vision goggles and other equipment. New York got a measly $5.41 per capita, leaving some of its most pressing needs underfunded or not funded at all.

Then last year, DHS announced that it would evaluate requests for funding based less on, er . . . politics and more on where terrorists are likely to strike. Unfortunately, the change was driven less by common sense than a shortfall in funding. Blames goes to that pesky Mess in Mesopotamia.

THE HEARTLAND, NOT THE HOMELAND

When 2006 funding was announced by DHS, both 9/11 targets -- New York City and Washington, D.C. -- got screwed. In fact, funding for both was cut an astonishing 40 percent, or from$207.6 million to $124.5 million for the Big Apple and from $77.5 million $46.5 million for D.C.

Meanwhile, terrorism hotspots like Omaha and Louisville got beaucoup bucks. So rest easy, America. Our meat-packing plants and the Kentucky Derby will be safe from suicide bombers.

KLINGONS ON THE STARBOARD BOW

The Dubai Ports World debacle of last year laid bare what was obvious to anyone who has followed the feeble homeland secutity efforts -- U.S. ports are among the most vulnerable targets.

And still are. Both the White House and its helpmates up on Capitol Hill, kissing big business ass, have resisted writing into law the kind of thorough security measures that would make U.S. ports less inviting to terrorists.

Meanwhile, the Coast Guard, under intense pressure from shipping companies concerned about costly delays, is tipping off large commercial ships about security searches that had been previously been a surprise.

DISASTROUS MANAGEMENT

We finally come to the most gaping holes in America's homeland security armor -- disaster management and intelligence. No event better captured the hubris and ineptness of the Bush presidency than the federal response to the suffering of Hurricane Katrina's victims.

Because the president took a battering in public-opinion polls and warnings that the 2006 hurricane season promised to be another humdinger (but fortunately was not), one would think that an effort has been made since Katrina to repair the literal and figurative damage that cataclysm caused.

Wrong. The Federal Emergency Management Agency remains the first-line of defense and the leading responder for large-scale disasters. Yet the Bush adminstration has done such an effective job of crippling FEMA by folding it into DHS and treating it like an unwanted stepchild, that a replacement couldn't be found for the disgraced Michael "You're Doing a Heck of a Job, Brownie" Brown, despite a lengthy nationwide search.

The reason why the White House eventually had to promote someone from within FEMA to run it: Prospective replacements were all too aware that President Bush had installed a series of political hacks to run FEMA and none believed that he was serious about fixing it.

A bipartisan Senate panel has agreed and said that FEMA is beyond repair and should be abolished.

UNTELLIGENCE

As for intelligence, the five years since 9/11 have been characterized by dithering, backbiting, recriminations and turf warring between the major intelligence agencies despite Negroponte's imprecations.

It is abundantly clear that the CIA, FBI and NSA had credible information that Al Qaeda planned attacks on the homeland.

The CIA had a specifial section devoted to tracking Al Qaeda. The NSA had radio intercepts between Al Qaeda operatives about the attacks. The FBI had information from agents in Phoenix and Minneapolis that operatives were training at U.S. flight schools and planned to hijack passenger jets.

We will never know if the attacks could have been prevented because the agencies never acted on the information, let alone shared it with one another.

The CIA's Al Qaeda posse was marginalized as a bunch of paranoid kooks. The NSA intercepts went into the round file at the White House, where National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice was still fighting the Cold War. The FBI agents were told to stop pestering the big boys at headquarters.

Ahem.