Counter-Counterterrorism: The debacle pre-9/11

Since 9/11 the law-enforcement model has been broadly criticized, by policy analysts and legislators alike. The congressional joint inquiry traced the 9/11 intelligence failures to "issues that transcend the Intelligence Community and involve questions of policy." Even after the 1998 African embassy attacks, Hill noted, "the United States continued to rely on what was primarily a law-enforcement approach to terrorism. As a result, while prosecutions succeeded in taking individual terrorists off the streets, the masterminds of past and future attacks often remained beyond the reach of justice."

Alas, the Bush administration has largely retained the Clinton model. The easing of Reno's strictures by the Patriot Act and the remanding of al-Qaeda prisoners to military tribunals have not changed the basic bureaucratic structure of counterterrorism. In May, President Bush actually expanded the FBI's counterterrorist mandate; and, in his Homeland Security Plan, he pledged that "the Department of Justice, and the FBI, will remain the lead law-enforcement agencies for preventing terrorist attacks."

Whether this effort should be led by a law-enforcement agency at all is an issue the administration is only now confronting. The November 4 assassination of an al-Qaeda leader in Yemen, reportedly by the CIA, would seem to mark a pronounced change for the better; under Clinton, FBI agents would simply have flashed their badges at Yemeni officials, then skulked home with empty handcuffs.

Encouragingly, too, there's a movement to transfer the FBI's spy functions to a new domestic-security unit. As this article went to press, Homeland Security director Tom Ridge was in London, holding talks with Eliza Manningham-Buller, director of Britain's domestic counterspy and counterterrorist unit, MI5. Unlike the FBI, MI5 has no law-enforcement mandate, but specializes in the collection of intelligence. Though Ridge would neither confirm nor deny that the administration was weighing an "MI5 solution," his visit came on the heels of meetings between Senate Intelligence Committee staffers and British security officials. At least three members of that committee -- Chairman Bob Graham and Sens. John Edwards and Fred Thompson -- are said to be crafting legislation for an "American MI5."

Any such initiative will face serious obstacles. Civil libertarians will view a domestic spy agency as a threat to constitutional rights: Sen. Dianne Feinstein has already spoken out against the idea on these grounds. Bureaucrats will see a new security service as a grab at their turf: FBI director Robert S. Mueller has predictably gone on record against it. Finally, one of the most influential members of the Bush team -- Vice President Dick Cheney -- is said to oppose any radical shakeup, apparently reasoning that the chaos of dislocation would be a cure worse than the disease of incompetence.

But it's hard to imagine what could be worse than the incompetence that led up to 9/11. The cause of that incompetence -- the Clinton law- enforcement model of counterterrorism -- should be addressed and removed now. As CIA director George Tenet testified on the final day of the intelligence hearings: "I think one of the things that we've learned is, is in hindsight, the country's mindset has to be changed fundamentally. . . . Because the threat environment we find ourselves in today is as bad as it was last summer, the summer before 9/11. They [al-Qaeda] have reconstituted. . . . They intend to strike this homeland again. And we better get about the business of putting the right [intelligence] structure in place as fast as we can."

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