Securing the homeland: the recent acts of the Bush administration and Congress to organize a homeland defense against terrorism follow the same lines proposed by the Clinton administration

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Nov 12, 2001 | by Kelly Patricia O'Meara

In response to the Sept. 11 attacks on the Pentagon and New York City's World Trade Center, both President George W. Bush and Congress have taken steps intended to protect the nation from further assault by terrorists. Whether any of these will prove successful is anyone's guess, as is the issue of whether additional precautions are anything more than redundancies, given the many related laws and Presidential Decision Directives (PDDs) that have been in place for years.

Within days of the terrorist attacks, Bush announced the creation of a Cabinet-level post to coordinate and develop policy for homeland security, appointing former Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge to do the job. Details of what this new quasi-"interior minister" will be asked to do have yet to be determined, but insiders say Ridge will have a staff of 100, including former White House counterterrorism chief Richard A. Clarke and retired U.S. Army general Wayne Downing.

Not to be outdone, Congress has approved new antiterrorism legislation significantly increasing the authority of law-enforcement and intelligence agencies to snoop as they've never snooped before. For instance, the electronic-surveillance provisions of this new antiterrorism bill will allow law-enforcement and intelligence agencies to employ roving wiretaps rather than requiring court approval line by line, and it will grant greater access to e-mail and Internet traffic. Equally serious, it will permit grand-jury information and wiretap transcripts, which long have been secret and a carefully protected domain of prosecutors, to be shared with intelligence agencies.

The necessity of these measures and the speed with which they were put in place implies that somewhere along the way law-enforcement and intelligence agencies may not have been playing well with others -- that information which may have been useful in detecting the conspiracy prior to the attacks of Sept. 11 might have fallen through bureaucratic cracks because jealous sister agencies were playing "Secrets of the Beaver Lodge."

However, despite the sincere intentions of both the president and Congress to provide the necessary tools to protect the "homeland," to date there has been no investigation into what, where or how it all went wrong. Many Washington insiders are wondering why new measures would be instituted without first determining where the system failed and why. In fact, many argue that adding new laws and bureaucracies further will confuse an already-tangled system.

Consider the following: In fiscal 2001 nearly $11.5 billion was appropriated among the 40 federal agencies and departments that handle counterterrorism, a nearly 50 percent increase above the average of the previous five years. Prior to the attacks, the FBI had more than tripled its counterterrorism force since the 1996 World Trade Center bombing, the CIA had created a Counter-Terrorism Center to deal with the threat and the National Domestic Preparedness Office was created to "coordinate all federal efforts," including those of the FBI, Federal Emergency Management Agency, the departments of Defense, Health and Human Services, Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency.

Furthermore, the Clinton administration's 2000 counterterrorism budget request included "increasing the number of Joint Terrorism Task Forces located throughout the United States, which were established to integrate the resources and expertise of the law-enforcement authorities of the FBI, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the U.S. Customs Service, the ATF [Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms], the Secret Service and state and local law enforcement."

Already on Clinton's watch, numerous PDDs had been signed to try to upgrade preparedness against terrorism, and they were remarkably similar to what Bush has recommended for the new Office of Homeland Security. These include:

* Presidential Directive 39: The U.S. Policy on Counterterrorism -- established the policy of the United States to "deter, defeat and respond vigorously to all terrorist attacks on our territory and against our citizens, or facilities, whether they occur domestically, in international waters or airspace or on foreign territory."

* Presidential Directive 62: Protection Against Unconventional Threats to the Homeland and Americans Overseas -- established the "office of the National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection and Counter-Terrorism."

* Presidential Directive 63: Critical Infrastructure Protection -- directed agencies to "maintain the ability to protect the nation's critical infrastructures from intentional acts that would significantly diminish the abilities of the federal government to perform national-security missions."

These rhetorical exercises appear to touch on every aspect of counterterrorism and first were introduced nearly six years ago. And add to all this the FBI's Terrorist Information System (TIS), a state-of-the-art, online database containing information on more than 200,000 individuals and 3,000 organizations or enterprises that may be subjects of investigations, suspected members of terrorist groups, associates, contacts, victims and witnesses. The TIS officially "allows the FBI to rapidly retrieve information and to make links between persons, groups and events."