GlobalSecurity.org In the News

Performance of intelligence agencies under scrutiny

By: Rebecca Carr and Julia Malone

WASHINGTON -- The question Tuesday for many Americans was this: How could a terrorist attack of such magnitude strike the nerve centers of the United States without warning?

The devastating attacks were immediately called an intelligence failure -- and a call to arms.

"If there was an act of war, this is it," said Michael Swetnam, president and founder of the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies, a nonpartisan, public policy think tank. "The time for good diplomacy and sanctions is over. We are at war." "This is an intelligence community failure," added Swetnam, who is also a member of an advisory panel to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. "Their job is to prevent Pearl Harbors. Obviously, they failed this time."

The nation's intelligence agencies have been aware for years that America could be vulnerable to such attacks, terrorism experts say. But they have been confounded by the need to balance security with civil liberties.

"We don't have the defense necessary to protect against this," said Ian Lesser, senior analyst at the nonpartisan RAND research institute based in California. "Are you going to put surface-to-air missiles on the roofs of all our symbolic buildings?"

"There's no way you can defend a free and open society in the sense of removing every area of vulnerability," said Anthony Cordesman, an adjunct professor at Georgetown University and former congressional military specialist for Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.

Not everyone was ready to blame U.S. intelligence. John Pike of the think tank GlobalSecurity.org said the failure was mainly one of airport security. With four separate planes hijacked in a carefully coordinated attack, "the notion that if we had just spent more on intelligence this would not have happened is absolutely unfair," Pike said.

Joseph Nye, dean of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and a former top Pentagon official, said the terrorist strikes reflected "a massive intelligence failure." But Nye added, "We don't always know about the intelligence successes. We only know about the failures."

Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., a member of the Senate Judiciary and Intelligence Committees, said lawmakers have been warned of this kind of attack for years. He also said the public seldom hears about the many terrorist attacks that are thwarted by good intelligence and detective work. "But when one like this occurs, we have to assess whether we did our jobs," Durbin said.

Just last March, a federal commission concluded after three years of study that "attacks against American citizens on American soil, possibly causing heavy casualties, are likely over the next quarter-century."

"We predicted in our report that these things would start to happen in America," said Warren Rudman, a former senator and co-chairman of that U.S. Commission on National Security for the 21st Century. "We're not surprised we are right. It will take more vigilance, more preparedness on the ground. You can't blame anyone for these things. When you have people willing to commit suicide, they are very hard to stop."

Government investigators have repeatedly said U.S. anti-terrorism efforts -- spread out over many agencies -- lack the coordination of other nations' security efforts.

The commission recommended creating a new agency, the National Homeland Security Agency, to take charge of prevention of and protection against terrorist attacks. "A single person, accountable to the president," the commission said, should be "responsible for coordinating and overseeing specific U.S. government activities related to homeland security."

Congressional hearings have been held on the commission's findings, but no action has been taken. Rudman predicted that Tuesday's attacks would cause the recommendations to be adopted. "After Pearl Harbor, everybody was galvanized," he said. "This is another Pearl Harbor."

American-Statesman Washington Staff writers Larry Lipman and Andrew J. Glass contributed to this report, which also includes material from The New York Times, The Boston Globe and Chicago Tribune.