Feel safer yet? A Gallup poll taken shortly after President Bush announced plans last week for a new Cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security shows an impressive 72 percent approval rating for the plan, according to CNN. Televised addresses typically boost presidential popularity. But a closer examination of this plan reveals some holes big enough to drive a truck loaded with explosives through.
Politically, Bush’s address also had the desired effect of diverting attention from the riveting testimony of FBI whistle-blower Coleen Rowleyin House-Senate intelligence hearings. She shook up Washington more than anyone else with her accounts of failures by FBI headquarters to “connect the dots” of critical information gathered before Sept. 11 by FBI field offices like the one in Minneapolis where Rowley works.
Bush’s answer to this bureaucratic snarl is to layer on some more bureaucracy. His new department will bring 46 agencies, as varied as the Coast Guard and the Plum Island Animal Disease Center, under a new Cabinet secretary.
But his plan offers nothing to reduce the inbred resistance of the FBI, CIA or supersecret National Security Agency to share any more information than they share now. Information-sharing is how the dots are gathered that analysts are supposed to connect. But Bush’s plan leaves the CIA and FBI autonomous and largely untouched, along with their troublesome internal cultures that prevent them from talking to one another.
“This new department will review intelligence and law enforcement information from all agencies of government and produce a single daily picture of threats against our homeland,” Bush said in his televised address last week. “Analysts will be responsible for imagining the worst and planning to counter it. The reason to create this department is not to increase the size of government, but to increase its focus and effectiveness.”
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Well, good luck with that, Mr. President.
Dedicated as our counterintelligence agents and analysts may be, they also are proud of what they do. In their cultures, where information is jealously gathered and guarded and sometimes bartered like currency, Bush’s happy vision of key information flowing uphill to one big collective catch sounds sort of like bureaucratic socialism–from each agent according to his or her ability to the new Cabinet secretary according to his or her needs. Karl Marx would be de-lighted.
A retired FBI agent once explained interagency rivalry to me like this: “Say you’ve been working on a big investigative story. You’ve just about got it nailed when your editor steps in and says you have to share your most important information with the competing newspaper across the street. How enthusiastic would you feel?”
As we have seen in a recent public dispute over Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s opposition to a cannon that the Army’s generals want, bringing service branches together by no means ended their sense of autonomy in getting something they want. Bush considered bringing the FBI and CIA under the new department, which would have been a truly dramatic move, but decided to leave it in the Justice Department. Bush’s Chief of Staff Andrew Card says Bush decided that would have concentrated too much power in one agency, like a “ministry of the interior” that gives the term “neighborhood watch” a sinister meaning in totalitarian regimes.
Instead, Bush has rearranged existing agencies into a cumbersome arrangement that Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) initially likened to “rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.”
Again, do you feel safer yet? Despite the president’s high approval ratings, Congress needs to critically examine Bush’s plan in order to resolve the gaping questions it leaves unanswered. A pretty good plan, hatched in the heat of spin control, isn’t good enough. Government’s big disadvantage in fighting terrorism, as former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher once observed, is that it must be “perfect” while the terrorists only have to be “lucky.”
Nobody’s perfect, but, as the intended targets of terrorists, we Americans need to come as close as we can.
We can’t get by on luck.
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