Why the Intelligence Reform Bill won’t make us more secure

In this post I’m going to try and make the case that there’s little reason to believe that the Intelligence Reform Bill that has just passed the House will make us any more secure. There are a few links you may find handy in the discussion. First, here’s the text of the bill. And here’s a decent summary of its contents. As it stands now the bill:

1. Calls for a Director of National Intelligence
2. Creates a National Counterterrorism Center
3. Calls for standardized driver’s license rules
4. Requires screening interviews for visa applicants
5. Establishes new programs for airline and border security
6. Creates an independent Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board.
7. Expands FBI powers on wiretapes, etc.
8. Calls for a variety of diplomatic overtures.

I’d call these measures probably necessary but not sufficient.

I was disappointed in the final report of the 9/11 Commission and the reason was fairly simple: while the report was encyclopedic in its description of what happened that day it did not devote sufficent energy to discovering the critical success factors for the attack. I’m not going to explore what I believe those critical success factors were—that’s beyond the scope of this post. But what I want to do is see if we can ferret out what the 9/11 Commission (and the Congress) believe the critical success factors were based on what’s in this legislation.

Provisions 1 and 2 provide for a unified command for intelligence and a clearing house for counterterrorism efforts. Provisions 3 and 4 strengthen legal drivers licensing and immigration requirements. Provision 7 facilitates FBI surveillance already underway. Provisions 6 and 8 don’t have any direct relevancy to the events of 9/11 or prohibiting future mass terror attacks.

Only provision 6 directs its attention to illegal activities

From these provisions I infer that the prescription for preventing future 9/11-style attacks is to give intelligence activities more centralized command and control, throw barriers in front of legal drivers licensing and immigration, and give the FBI greater leeway in conducting surveillance.

Note to Congress: we have hundreds of thousands if not millions of illegal immigrants coming over our borders every year and many of them drive without licenses or on fraudulent drivers licenses. The 9/11 terrorists were not under surveillance by the FBI. And the failures of intelligence sharing were not due to lack of centralized command but due to failures of imagination and a general disinclination to share information neither of which are addressed by more centralized control.

These provisions won’t prevent future terrorist attacks. But they may make it easier to figure out whose fault the next attack is. In my opinion that’s a goal that’s just not worth paying for.

Let me give you an example of what I think is going on here. Let’s say you live in a city that has just been damaged by a severe tidal wave. You find that all of your outer sea walls were completely destroyed by the incoming wave and that only one of your inner walls survived and prevented even greater damage to the city. Why would anybody believe that rebuilding the outer sea walls as just as they had been before and throwing a few extra sandbags on them would reduce the likelihood of future flooding? I think I’d probably want to shore up the wall that survived. And build more like it.

The reality of what happened on September 11, 2001 is that there was a total failure by the federal government to prevent what happened. Congress failed. The White House failed. State department visa officials failed. Immigration officials failed. The FBI failed. The CIA failed. Air traffic controllers failed. There just aren’t any successes by the federal government to point to. There’s nothing to shore up and no reason to believe that a few more sandbags will help at all. Maybe they will. But why should we believe that they will?

I could understand a complete re-design. I just can’t understand the measures that are being taken.

And they’re failing to provide additional support for what actually prevented even more damage. There’s little doubt that the heroes of Flight 93 prevented an attack on the White House or the Capitol.

So why aren’t there provisions for training the populace—the militia—that actually functioned as the Founding Fathers expected? Teaching people that they’re fundamentally responsible for their own security? No, another level of bureaucracy will do the trick.

UPDATE: Jeff Medcalf of Caerdroia tells me I’m being too tough on air traffic control. Jeff writes:

Of all of the
Federal government employees that day, theirs [ed. i.e. air traffic control] was the one notable
success. The controllers identified all of the out of control
aircraft, in enough time that all but the first could have been
intercepted had we then had fighters on alert the way that they are
today. The controllers shut down the entire American airspace –
which hasn’t been planned for or practiced since the jet age began –
in an amazingly short amount of time. (It’s basically the same thing
as simultaneously managing over 1000 emergency landings!)

Jeff is undoubtedly right. But when I first read the 9/11 Commission Report I searched—in vain—for some mention of military air traffic control. Perhaps someone can point me in the right direction. And since September, 2001 I’ve imagined that on that day somewhere there was a military air traffic controller who drank his (or her) coffee and watched the blip fly closer and closer to the Pentagon and had neither the mission nor the training to take the necessary actions. So I don’t blame that military air traffic controller. I blame his (or her) command structure, the President, and the Congress.