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Question implementation { June 7 2002 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A9111-2002Jun6.htmlhttp://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A9111-2002Jun6.html
A Question of Implementation
By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, June 7, 2002; Page A01
A new Department of Homeland Security, as envisioned by President Bush, would mark a huge shift in the way the federal government manages the country's internal security.
If it works as planned, the department will streamline the collection, analysis and response to intelligence about terrorist threats. But it also could divert the attention of the president and other top officials from the war on terrorism by focusing them on reorganizing a group of wildly disparate and sometimes unwieldy agencies employing 170,000 people, according to experts on national security.
Such divergent assessments forecast a debate sure to rage for months about whether the president's plan will plug the most glaring holes in the country's domestic defenses. While specialists on national security agreed the proposal would help unify an often-fractious bureaucracy, they also worried that it doesn't go far enough -- and does little to address the information-sharing failures that have plagued the FBI and the CIA.
Many said it places a huge burden on whoever becomes the secretary of the new department.
"A lot depends on how much power the new secretary has over all the organizations in his department," said retired Marine Col. Gary Anderson, an expert on intelligence. If the secretary fails to bring them together in a coordinated way, Anderson said, it could be "just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic."
There already are plenty of skeptics. "This does nothing to . . . fix anything," retired Navy Capt. John Byron, a frequent commentator on national security organizations, said last night. "Instead we have a woeful secretary heading a pickup squad with few resources and no power to compel cooperation" from the FBI and the CIA.
As currently constituted, the agencies that would be folded into the new department -- the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Customs Service, the Coast Guard, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and more than a dozen other entities -- go well beyond policing the borders. They reach deep into American life, doing everything from coordinating disaster relief to tracking down foreigners working illegally in restaurants.
Some experts said this could prove controversial, because it blurs the boundaries between gathering intelligence on foreigners and doing the same with American citizens. They said it is possible that some of the more intrusive parts of the new department could be moved elsewhere, such as back into the Justice Department.
While the proposed structure of the new department does not address the recent failures of the FBI and the CIA to adequately share information, experts said it might address the more fundamental problem of not having any one part of the government assigned to detect and counter threats to the homeland.
Had the new system been in place and on alert last September, said Eliot Cohen, a specialist in national security strategy at Johns Hopkins University, the homeland security department's intelligence analysts "might have said, 'There's a major problem here and we don't have adequate penetration of Islamic extremist groups in the United States.' "
For that reason, the most significant step proposed by the president might be the creation of the center for the assessment of intelligence about threats to the homeland, Cohen said. It would be incorrect to think that the FBI currently performs that function, he explained. "The huge weakness of the FBI has been in intelligence and analysis," he said. "It's not an analytic culture, it's a police culture."
The major intended benefit of creating a huge new department is to improve the coordination of intelligence and the response to it. Frank Hoffman, who played a key behind-the-scenes role in formulating the ideas that led to Bush's proposal, said, "This will lead to some fairly sophisticated information sharing, compared to the FBI and CIA, which are insular and don't share."
Two years ago, Hoffman drafted recommendations for a new homeland security department while a member of the staff of a congressionally appointed commission on national security led by former senators Warren B. Rudman (R-N.H.) and Gary Hart (D-Colo.).
With a more coordinated analysis of possible threats, Hoffman said, "you might have stopped one or two of the four hijacked planes" on Sept. 11. In addition, he said, "you might have improved the White House's response, because they would have exercised some of these scenarios, and known immediately what they could do and couldn't do."
To some analysts, however, the proposal smacked of a knee-jerk move to centralize power without really understanding the problem. That's "a typical political response to a crisis," said University of Tennessee strategic studies specialist Rosemary Mariner. But "it creates its own problems," such as diminishing flexibility and establishing huge and unresponsive headquarters staffs.
Another major problem with the proposed reorganization may be that, though ambitious, it doesn't give the new department the resources it needs to act on the information that is collected and analyzed. The department would be dependent on other parts of the government for much of its intelligence and most of its enforcement capabilities.
Basically, said Michael Vickers, a former CIA officer, the new department will be forced to rely on the FBI, the CIA and the National Security Agency for information and would be vulnerable to the same problems that have bedeviled those organizations.
"Clearly, this is a big step in the right direction," said John Hillen, who helped write Bush's campaign speeches on defense and served on the staff of the Hart-Rudman commission. But he said that he was worried by the lack of enforcement capability in the new department, such as having its own marshals.
"You don't want someone who tracks container ships for this new Department of Homeland Security to have to spend three weeks making the case to the FBI that they need to act on it," Hillen said. Instead, he said, "you need to be able to look over to the guy in the next cubicle and say, 'Send the boys in.' "
Along the same lines, former House speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) said that eventually Congress should consider dividing the FBI into two entities.
He suggested splitting off its anti-terrorism efforts from its law enforcement duties, transferring the former to the new Homeland Security Department. Likewise, he said that the immigration service's internal law enforcement function might be split off and taken out of homeland security.
© 2002 The Washington Post Company
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