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| We Need A Domestic CIA |
| 2006-05-15 |
| BY RICHARD A. POSNER Assuming that Michael Hayden is confirmed as CIA director, the agency will be in strong hands--especially if, as rumored, Stephen Kappes is appointed his deputy. General Hayden is the nation's senior intelligence officer (his current boss, John Negroponte, the director of national intelligence, is a career diplomat rather than an intelligence professional). Mr. Kappes, a former director of the operations (human intelligence) division of the CIA, is highly respected throughout the intelligence community. These appointments will not "recenter" the beleaguered Central Intelligence Agency, which is being squeezed from three sides: The Defense Department, the FBI and the director of national intelligence are all encroaching on functions once securely within the CIA's domain. But with luck, Messrs. Hayden and Kappes can prevent a further erosion of the agency's standing, restore morale and take care that the CIA performs its core functions competently. The picture may be brightening as far as foreign intelligence is concerned, but it remains dark with respect to domestic intelligence. In my forthcoming book, I explain why burying our principal assets for detecting terrorist plots that unfold within the U.S. in a criminal-investigation agency--the FBI--is unsound. We are the only major country that does this. The U.K.'s domestic intelligence agency, MI5, works closely with Scotland Yard, Britain's counterpart to the FBI. But it is not part of Scotland Yard. The British understand that a criminal-investigation culture and an intelligence culture don't mix. A crime occurs at a definite time and place, enabling a focused investigation likely to culminate in an arrest and conviction. Intelligence seeks to identify enemies and their plans before any crime occurs. It searches for terrorist sleeper cells in the U.S. with no assurance of finding any. Hunting needles in a haystack is uncongenial work for FBI special agents. And so at the same time that the attorney general was testifying before Congress that the National Security Agency's intercepting some communications of U.S. citizens is essential to national security, leaks from inside the FBI revealed that special agents are disgruntled at having to chase down the leads furnished to them by NSA. FBI special agents--the bureau's only operations officers--want to make arrests, and so they zero in on animal-rights terrorists and ecoterrorists--people known to be committing crimes and therefore relatively easy to nail. These people are criminals and should be prosecuted, but as they do not endanger national security, prosecuting them should not be an intelligence priority. Changing an institutional culture is difficult at best; in this case it may be impossible. Almost five years after 9/11, the horses of change at the FBI have left the paddock but are still short of the starting gate. At least $100 million spent on trying to equip the bureau with modern information technology adequate to its intelligence tasks has been squandered. Just eight months after the president forced a fiercely recalcitrant bureau to combine its intelligence-related divisions into a single unit (the "National Security Branch"), the unit's first and only director has resigned to become the security director of a cruise-ship line. The FBI's primary mission is and will remain fighting crime; and just as crime-fighters don't make good intelligence operatives, intelligence operatives don't make good crime-fighters. The FBI fears compromising its main mission by embracing its secondary one. The objections to creating a U.S. counterpart to MI5 are shallow. The FBI notes that Britain has only about 50 police forces and the U.S. 18,000: How could a U.S. domestic intelligence agency staff 18,000 field offices? It couldn't, of course. But neither can the FBI, which has only 56 field offices and an attitude of hauteur toward local police. Some fear that a domestic intelligence agency would be a secret police, spying on Americans. But like MI5 (and its Canadian counterpart, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service), such an agency would have no powers of arrest, and no greater authority to "spy on Americans" than the FBI now does. Domestic intelligence is vital because of the danger of terrorist attacks from inside the U.S., such as the 9/11 attacks, and controversial because it entails surveillance of Americans, and not just of foreigners abroad--hence the current controversies over domestic surveillance by the NSA and over the Defense Department's expanding role in domestic intelligence. Before the fifth anniversary of 9/11 rolls around, we need an agency (which the president could create by executive order, as he did the National Counterterrorism Center in August 2004) that, unhampered by either military or law-enforcement responsibilities, can begin to plug a gaping hole in our defense against terrorism. Mr. Posner, a federal circuit judge and a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School, is the author of "Uncertain Shield: The U.S. Intelligence System in the Throes of Reform," which will be published next week by Rowman & Littlefield. |
| Posted by:ryuge |
| #7 And who is giving up an ESSENTIAL liberty? name it please. If youare talking about call records, you already give up far more than that every time you dial a phone call - its not an essential liberty, per the Supreme Court, in that you have no privacy expectation of your phone records because you willingly give up that info in exchange for a service with a commercial third party. To get that data doesnt even require a warrant. And what TEMPORARY and LITTLE safety are we buying? I'd say preventing another large scale mass-csaulaty attack is neither temporary nor small. The consequences of failing to do so are quite olarge and permanent: see the holes in the groundin NY about "little"and talk to the relatives of the dead about "temporary". The damage was large, and the dead are that way quite permanently. |
| Posted by: Oldspook 2006-05-15 16:20 |
| #6 “Those who would give up essential Liberty to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety" - Ben Franklin |
| Posted by: mcsegeek1 2006-05-15 15:41 |
| #5 I was confused by the article. What is the stick this organization wields? It doesn't sound like it gets to prosecute anybody because it won't follow all the constitutional Ps and Qs the constitution is interpreted to require. And you can't tell me they'll be allowed to practice wetworks. So what can they do? Identify that the Superbowl will be bombed tomorrow and get the game cancelled? |
| Posted by: Nimble Spemble 2006-05-15 13:02 |
| #4 So we need an MI-5 that will ignore tapes of terrorists planning bomb attacks? No thanks. Let's just have the freaking law enforcement we already have actually enforce the law for a change. |
| Posted by: Rob Crawford 2006-05-15 13:02 |
| #3 Kappes for DDCI? Now that's a bit of a surprise! FYI - good points here for an MI-5 type agency. But severe "firewalls" would need to be emplaced on such an agency to restict damage in the event its is misused. But very good point that we have 2 different functions. The first is investigation, deterrence and prosecution after the fact. That's the FBI. the second (and newer) is intelligence, detection and prevention before the fact. Thats sort-of DHS, and sort-of FBI. FBI bungled this pre-9/11 because their primary training and intenit is for Item 1 above. They simply didn't have the training aptitude and attitude to do the second job, nor did they have the tools and laws. |
| Posted by: Oldspook 2006-05-15 12:55 |
| #2 If we had a Domestic CIA, they could spend their time trying to overthrow the evil BusHitler(tm) regime while the Grown-Up CIA was busy trying to protect the country. Interesting point about the FBI. The Commerce clause of the Constitution has been used as justification for meddling in far too many things. |
| Posted by: SteveS 2006-05-15 12:54 |
| #1 Actually we have two. The first was the FBI, which was reasonably effective as a counterintelligence internal security organization until the US Congress overloaded them with policing federal crimes redundant with State and even local offenses, for political brownie points. By making them police crimes that are not even vaguely in Constitutional federal jurisdiction, much of the assets of the FBI are utterly wasted on petty crap and publicity stunts. The second and far more recent is the Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive, which even as a new organization has to rate as being the most unloved and unwanted thing next to a large dead raccoon hidden beneath the floorboards. |
| Posted by: Anonymoose 2006-05-15 09:15 |