9/11 Comm. leader: 'Flaws' need fixing

by Mark Silva

Lee Hamilton, vice chairman of the 9/11 Commission that spawned a new organization for U.S. intelligence-gathering, says the failure to detect a known threat boarding a U.S.-bound airliner on Christmas Day with explosives is a sign of the intelligence community's inability to always assess all of the massive flow of information that is flowing into its offices.

The episode does not call for another reorganization of the intelligence community, Hamilton said today - a day on which the White House will release some of the findings of its initial review of the attempted bombing of the Detroit-bound airliner - but rather demands an immediate fix of the "flaw'' that the incident exposed in the system.

"My view is that, unlike 9/11, where the problem was a failure to share information principally, the problem on Christmas Day arose not because of the failure to share, but a failure to analyze and integrate,'' said Hamilton, a former Democratic congressman from Indiana who serves as director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., now.

"It is fundamentally a data management problem... how you manage billions of bytes of data that come to you every day,'' Hamilton said at a breakfast for reporters today sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor. With all of the people who enter the United States each day, he said, "You really are looking at the proverbial needle in the haystack.''

A certain "complacency'' had set in since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Hamilton suggested today. "We hadn't been attacked - probably the main reason. Complacency set in in the country, after 9/11.''

And, while Congress and the Bush administration responded rapidly to the 9/11 Commission's call for a new organization, with a centralization of U.S. intelligence gathering under one Director of National Intelligence and the creation of a National Counter-terrrorism Center, Hamilton says Congress still has failed to gain the oversight over intelligence spending that is necessary, and the Obama administration still is grappling with a problem that has eluded its predecessors.

"I think we've made a good bit of progress since 9/11 in many different areas, but I do not feel that homeland security is at the highest priority level of the government,'' Hamilton said. "It may well be that this Detroit incident will change that.... My own view is that al Qaeda extremists continue to want to inflict harm on us... They are quite sophisticated in the analysis of our vulnerabilities, and the threat continues to be real... We have to keep our guard up.''

Hamilton stands by the creation of the DNI, the one agency that oversees the 16 various civilian and military intelligence agencies of the federal government - one of the signal products of the inquiry led by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States. Hamilton was vice-chairman, Republican Tom Kean chairman.

"Somewhere in the government, you have to have someone who forces the sharing of information, who brings together all the bytes of information that our government gathers every day for the purposes of analysis... Right now, under our law... the National Counter-terrorism Center is where this information comes together,'' Hamilton said today. " We can gather information... the easier part of the job... The problem is less gathering and collection than it is analysis.''

In the saga of the Detroit-bound airliner boarded by a Nigerian whose father had warned the U.S. embassy in Nigeria that his son was becoming radicalized, at a time when U.S. intelligence was collecting information that al Qaeda in Yemen was plotting an attack, Hamilton said: "I think the failure is to investigate data that comes to you and to investigate it and follow it up very hard... You get a flash on the computer screen saying the father of this young man said he had become radicalized, OK, that's a red flag. You must identify it as a red flag.

"But more than that, you've got to begin to dig immediately as to what that means, what other data do we have about that young man... There has to be very tough investigation to follow up on these leads... That is the flaw in this system...''

No amount of reorganization can happen quickly enough to address the flaw exposed on Christmas Day, he said, maintaining that the intelligence organization as it stands should serve well.

"You're still going to have to have some overarching authority,'' Hamilton said. "You can't go back to the 16 different stovepipes... Somewhere you've got to put together the information from 16 different agencies and analyze it.'' Call that overarching agency what you want, he said. "You've got to deal with that problem.''

The 9/11 Commission cited then-CIA Director George Tenet as saying that the "system was blinking red'' in the summer of 2001. The president this week said that "red flags'' had been missed in advance of the Detroit episode. Both the commission after 9/11 and President Barack Obama this week said the intelligence community had failed to "connect the dots.'' But the 9/11 Commission also said that failure to connect the dots was a "symptom'' of the problem, not "the disease.''

"The disease here,'' Hamilton said today, "I'm not quite sure how to define that, but on the basis of the information out I now have, I do not see this as a structural problem, I do not see it as a failure of sharing information. I see it as a situation where a number of government employees, some of whom would be at the mid-level, in other words, not at the top of the heap, missed things that they should have caught.

"This is human failure,'' he said. "You're never going to produce a system that is completely flawless, and when you're sitting at that computer screen day after day looking... you're going to miss some things.... I think we're a lot better at this than we used to be, but you cannot get this down to zero mistakes....

"The tough part of intelligence is not collection, but it is analysis.... It takes a long time to train a really good analyst.

"The fact that a father warns about the radicalization of his son doesn't mean therefore that the son is a terrorist,'' Hamilton said. "You've got to put some other dots together... That flashes across your screen, you've got to trigger an investigation.''

Another question arising from the episode is how the U.S. can "sharpen the watch-list'' that authorities maintain for people entering the country, he said. Yet, enemies intent on attacking always are watching for changes that they can work around, he said, pointing to the 9/11 attackers who knew they could not get on an airplane plane with eight- inch blades, so they used four-inch blades.

"They know the vulnerabilities of our system,'' he said. "Whatever we do to strengthen that system, you can bet they are going to find a way to get around it.''

Hamilton also was asked about the lessons to be learned from the infiltration of a forward-operating base in Afghanistan where a spy who the CIA was using to infiltrate al Qaeda turned on his handlers and killed seven agents of the CIA with a suicide bomb.

"I don't know exactly what the lessons are, but here's person who ingratiated himself to our top spies, and he did some things that are helpful to us,'' Hamilton said. "One of the most obvious lessons is that you don't let anyone through that gate without a thorough search. It's amazing to me that they didn't search... it should be a simple matter. You put Gen. Petraeus through those things.''

The broader challenge for the United States, Hamilton maintains, remains a message in the 9/11 Commission report that was generally overlooked: Chapter 12, and its recommendation that the U.S. adopt as new "global strategy.'' The U.S. must better identify the emerging threats that radical factions in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere pose, the commission recommended, and focus more on preventing "the continued growth of Islamist terrorism.''

"I think they'll go where we're not,'' Hamilton said, with words that bear some irony in the midst of a U.S. buildup of military forces in Afghanistan. "These guys are not stupid. If we put a lot of resources in Afghanistan, they're going to go to Pakistan. If you put a lot of resources into Pakistan, they're going to go to Yemen. If you put a lot of resources into Yemen, they're going to go to Somalia. If you put a lot of resources into Somalia, they're going to go into the sub-Sahara.... ''

The U.S. still must focus better on its relationship with the Islamic world, he said. "I think the Cairo speech (by Obama) reflected a lot of Chapter 12... The problem with the Cairo speech is following up on it. I think they are having a lot of trouble following up on it.''

Hamilton, a longtime member of Congress who has advised the Obama administration on intelligence matters, was more reserved in his assessment of how the Obama administration is performing. When it comes to working with the Congress, Hamilton said, no one in his lifetime has been more masterful than President Lyndon Johnson.

"I don't think we've had a president who was in the same ballpark working with the Congress as Lyndon Johnson,'' he said, suggesting that Johnson knew what every single member of Congress needed in order to win his support on a vote. "No president has been in the class of Lyndon Johnson with regard to their ability to move the Congress.''

Johnson also had a Medicare bill in the works when he took office, Hamilton noted, and the health-care bill that passes Congress will not be the end-product. "In the end, we'll judge Obama on this by the result,'' he said. "He will get... a health-care bill. That health-care bill will not be a solution to our problems, but that bill will become a framework to address our problems in the future.''

"The politics of this are going to be very prominent,'' Hamilton said. "The Republicans sense an opening here, and they are going to go after that. Frankly am not very interested in the politics. I never have been much interested in politics. By politics, I mean in this case, the back and forth of parties... My interest is policy and always has been. The only reason I got into politics was because of my interest in policy.

"I don't fall off my chair every time (former Vice President Dick) Cheney makes a crack about Obama,'' he said. "If that attack (on the Detroit-bound airliner) had succeeded, it would have been a huge (gain) for Republicans'' because they could have Obama is not protecting us.

"Our focus should not be on who's at fault... The priority interest should be to identify the flaws... and correct those flaws,'' Hamilton said, noting that enemies of the U.S. will be watching, too. "They're going to try to correct it, and they are going to try to come at us again.''

Asked whether the Christmas Day episode points to any need for an overhaul of the president's own national security team, he said:

"I wouldn't make that judgment today.... I have been favorably impressed in the manner with which President Obama has approached these things... He called in all of his people, really drilled them, as I understand that meeting'' of the president's national security and intelligence advisers this week, and he is releasing a review today.

"Robust oversight of the intelligence community has to come from Congress,'' Hamilton said. "We described it as dysfunctional... those words did not com from us. They came from the members of the intelligence committees..''

The most obvious need for streamlining of congressional oversight is in homeland security, Hamilton says.

Some 108 committees and subcommittees now have some sort of oversight, he said. "That's a joke. If you have oversight by 108 subcommittees you have oversight by nobody...One thing they have to do is centralize the oversight of homeland security.... Every single senator has oversight over the Department of Homeland Scurity'' in one way or another. "That's a problem.''

Ultimately, he suggested, some individuals will be held accountable for the Christmas Day episode - but watch for that accountability at the mid-levels of the intelligence community.

"The intelligence community screws up now and then,'' Hamilton concluded. "You've had all kinds of mistakes in the intelligence community in the last 50 years. You want to minimize that... Every once in a while you need a fresh set of eyes'' looking at it.

"I think people should lose their job if they clearly missed the signal,'' he said. "I don't know if I'm talking about three people or 50, but there are obviously some.... So far as I know, at this time, it would be mid-level people.'' There were significant pieces missed, such as the father's report on his son. "That's pretty egregious.... The people who made those mistakes should be penalized, lose their jobs or whatever.

"My priority interest,'' he said, "is repairing the flaws.''