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COMMENTARY
June 7, 2002
Homeland security
In probably the biggest restructuring of the United States government since Harry Truman merged Navy and War into the Department of Defence in 1947 President George W. Bush announced yesterday the formation of a Department of Homeland Security. This will be the catchment in future for the FBI the CIA the immigration service Customs the border patrol the Coast Guard and a large number of smaller specialized agencies including the new Transportation Security Administration in charge of removing terrorists from airports. As someone who has recently become an afficionado of the way the U.S. government works my mind boggles at the turf wars. As a person who has been repeatedly disabused of any illusions he ever had about bureaucracy I am profoundly sceptical. The eggs were already individually too large and putting them all in the same pan strikes me as the recipe for an ostrich omelette. And while the new "central processing" division may occasionally staple relevant memos together it is another layer of bureaucracy interposed between the eye and the brain. The whole thing smacks of concession to political pressure. But my own reservations aside the proposal is a dramatic response to revelations brought before the U.S. Congress and public opinion of the extraordinary feats of ineptitude performed by CIA and FBI in the past. It also gives Tom Ridge who competent people have told me is competent someone to boss around. For Mr. Bush's homeland security chief previously had a staff of only 12 minions the equivalent of a slingshot in a nuclear war. I am surprised by some of the revelations especially the charges that the president was hiding information that had reached him before 9/11. While my memory no longer quite serves I remember hearing of a couple of these stories being passed around Washington just after the blast and didn't even realize they were secrets. As to warnings from Egyptians Jordanians and other foreigners beforehand these came as surprises at least to me (I'd heard the Israeli Mossad had flashed some sort of heads-up). But I'm aware that there are frequent warnings from such sources and not surprised if they were totally ignored. For the unspeakable truth is that the intelligence agencies in these countries are constantly trying to cover their backsides with the Americans and everyone else; the same way the CIA covers its backsides by passing every untraceable threat to the flatfoots at the FBI. My sympathies are engaged mostly with these latter who have to decide what to do based on almost no previous experience with international terrorism or how the world works outside the USA. Hosni Mubarak the Egyptian president has for his own suspicious motives been making a big song and dance of the Egyptian warning recently. (It took him a while to find out about it himself.) On the situation generally I would add yes Mubarak warned you Abdullah warned you the cops warned you the Kaiser warned you Tecumseh warned you everybody warned you has been warning you hourly for the last two centuries and a quarter and you never listened. Nobody ever listens until they're hit. But what separates the deceased from the survivors is who listens afterwards. And what they do when they hear. While it has advanced the political ambitions of the Democratic party I don't think the hunt for incompetents -- to establish before Congressional committee who knew what when and what they didn't do about it prior to 9/11 -- is doing U.S. national security the tiniest bit of good. The argument is that we must learn from our mistakes therefore our mistakes must be forensically examined. The reality is that such an inquiry is a distraction for the whole security force the most responsible members of which must now spend every waking hour as a natural reaction adding padding to the seats of their trousers. It gives them a motive to conceal information that might still prove useful. And worst of all it broadcasts to Terror International every gaping hole in U.S. defences. If I were a terrorist myself I'd be reading the New York Times very carefully. For the truth which doesn't require an investigation is that until somebody actually does fly something like an airplane into something like the World Trade Centre no normal person can believe that anyone would do it. (I thought of it but I'm not normal.) The mind shrinks from evil on that scale. For the future there is no major structural change to the bureaucraties that is going to make much difference in results. The important thing -- the attitude change -- has already been accomplished thanks not to the President but to Osama bin Laden. It is only when they have seen what can happen that the sense of urgency is knocked in and even the mass of mediocrities that staff intelligence and police and immigration agencies find themselves raised to a higher plain of consciousness. (And the more capable and dedicated people among them finally get promoted.) The next most important thing has not yet been attempted and I'm sorry to hear from the handful of (intelligent) intelligence professionals with whom I sometimes communicate that they don't think it is going to happen or can happen until the next big hit . And this is to drop totally the demand for "political correctness" that is distracting all of our investigators from following their best leads. The need for intensive "ethnic profiling" in the search for terrorists is a life-or-death proposition the screaming obviousness of which has not yet penetrated the self-protective minds of the political class. The police and intelligence officers all know it but dare not speak at the risk of their jobs. And the general public also knows it without having any idea how to express it. As Mark Steyn declared in his brilliant (even for him) National Post column for May 27 which I was pleased to help copy all over the U.S. it is not an issue whether Americans (and Canadians) are willing to die for political correctness They already have. Every single lapse so far documented in U.S. security before 9/11 was due at least partially to the fear both at headquarters and in the field that action might draw a charge of racism from an organization like the Council on American Islamic Relations (whose Ottawa office busies itself laying such charges against Canadian journalists who dare to tell the truth). The attitude towards CAIR in particular should be Let them yell. Meanwhile in Canada we have the absolute scandal of our immigration and refugee policies the refusal to provide adequate resources to our border inspectors intelligence agents and police detailed political interference in their investigative activities and the many other culpable oversights that have reduced this country's security to a farce. And the pitfight that has now begun between Jean Chretien and Paul Martin has put paid to any chance of reform. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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