Begin with today's Gray Lady front-pager on a top Transportation Security Administration (TSA) target: One "selectee" list denizen, searched nearly always, at times aggressively: 8-year-old Michael Hicks, who shares a name with someone else on the list:
Michael Winston Hicks’s mother initially sensed trouble when he was a baby and she could not get a seat for him on their flight to Florida at an airport kiosk; airline officials explained that his name “was on the list,” she recalled.
The first time he was patted down, at Newark Liberty International Airport, Mikey was 2. He cried.
After years of long delays and waits for supervisors at every airport ticket counter, this year’s vacation to the Bahamas badly shook up the family. Mikey was frisked on the way there, then more aggressively on the way home.
“Up your arms, down your arms, up your crotch — someone is patting your 8-year-old down like he’s a criminal,” Mrs. Hicks recounted. “A terrorist can blow his underwear up and they don’t catch him. But my 8-year-old can’t walk through security without being frisked.”
It is true that Mikey is not on the federal government’s “no-fly” list, which includes about 2,500 people, less than 10 percent of them from the United States. But his name appears to be among some 13,500 on the larger “selectee” list, which sets off a high level of security screening.
At some point, someone named Michael Hicks made the Department of Homeland Security suspicious, and little Mikey is still paying the price. (His father, also named Michael Hicks, was stopped for the first time on the Bahamas trip.)
Both lists are maintained by the Terrorist Screening Center, which includes the Federal Bureau of Investigation. They are given to the Transportation Security Administration, which in turn sends them to the airlines.
A spokesman for the T.S.A., James Fotenos, said that as a rule, “there are no children on the no-fly or selectee lists,” but would not comment on Mikey’s situation specifically.
Mikey has been searched since he was two--yes, 2!--years old:
Certainly, Mikey’s date of birth, less than a month before 9/11, should prevent him from being mistaken as a terrorist.
A third grader at a parochial school in Clifton, N.J., Mikey recites the drill like the world-weary traveler he is. Leave early for the airport, always with his passport. Try to get a boarding pass at the counter. This will send up a flag. The ticket agent, peering down at tiny bespectacled Mikey, will apologize or roll her eyes, and call for a supervisor. The supervisor, after a phone call — or, more likely, a series of phone calls — will ultimately finagle him onto the plane. But the Hickses are typically the last to select seats and the last to board, which means they sometimes can’t sit together.
Mrs. Hicks, a photojournalist who herself got Secret Service clearance to travel aboard Air Force II with then-Vice President Al Gore, anticipated additional chaos following the attempted underwear bombing. Before leaving for the Bahamas on Jan. 2, she reached out to Congressman Pascrell’s office, which then enlisted a T.S.A. agent to meet the family at the airport. Even this did not prevent Mikey from an extra pat-down.
On the way home last Friday, Mikey’s boarding pass showed four giant red S’s at the airport in Nassau. “Oh, random screening,” Mrs. Hicks said. Mikey asked his mother not to worry and said he would use his tae kwon do — he has a junior black belt — if needed. Mrs. Hicks said she wanted to take pictures of her son being frisked but was told it was against the rules.
Mikey, who would rather talk about BMX bikes and his athletic trophies than airport security, remains perplexed about the “list” and the hurdles he must clear. “Why do they think a kid is a terrorist?” Mikey asked his mother at one point during the interview.
Bret Stephens offers a telling illustration of how the oxymoron we call bureaucratic intelligence is hampering us in fighting jihaidsts here & abroad. Noting the flaccid report on the Flight #253 bombing issued last week, Stephens then turns to a new report on intelligence and offers a perfect example from Afghan War annals:
Case study in point: As recently as last June, the Nawa district in Afghanistan's embattled Helmand Province was largely under the Taliban's control. "American and British troops could not venture a kilometer from their base without confronting machine gun and rocket fire from insurgents. Local farmers, wary of reprisals by the Taliban, refused to make eye contact with foreign soldiers, much less speak with them or offer valuable battlefield and other demographic information."
But that began to change in July with the arrival of 800 Marines, who fanned out through the district with the goal of discovering its so-called anchor points: "local personalities and local grievances that, if skillfully exploited, could drive a wedge between insurgents and the greater population."
In Nawa, the anchor point turned out to be the resentment of local elders to the Taliban's usurpation of their traditional authority. As in Anbar province in Iraq, winning the trust of those elders turned out to be more important for Nawa's rapid transformation into a relatively thriving, peaceful place than simply killing Talibs.
This is the sort of story that we'd all like to see replicated throughout Afghanistan. Yet the success in Nawa was never communicated through official channels, and became known mainly through the media. When it comes to bureaucracies, including the military's, information always seeks a cubby hole. That's also where it tends to stay.
The report's solution, in part, is the creation of new information centers that can synthesize intelligence as it works its way from the bottom up. But the more important recommendation concerns the type of officer who would staff these centers: "Analysts must absorb information with the thoroughness of historians, organize it with the skill of librarians, and disseminate it with the zeal of a journalist," the authors write. "Sufficient knowledge will not come from slides with little more text than a comic strip."
Stephens cites an acid report by three authors, "Fixing Intel: A Blueprint for Making Intelligence Relevant in Afghanistan", citing human attitudinal and cultural factors as key problems:
Ironically, the barriers to maximizing available intelligence are surprisingly few. The deficit of data needed by high-level analysts does not arise from a lack of reporting in the field. There are literally terabytes of unclassified and classified information typed up at the grassroots level. Nor, remarkably, is the often-assumed unwillingness to share information the core of the problem. On the contrary, military officers and civilians working with ISAF allies, and even many NGOs, are eager to exchange information. True, there are severe technological hurdles, such as the lack of a common database and digital network available to all partners, but they are not insurmountable.
The most salient problems are attitudinal, cultural, and human. The intelligence community’s standard mode of operation is surprisingly passive about aggregating information that is not enemy-related and relaying it to decision-makers or fellow analysts further up the chain. It is a culture that is strangely oblivious of how little its analytical products, as they now exist, actually influence commanders.
It is also a culture that is emphatic about secrecy but regrettably less concerned about mission effec- tiveness. To quote General McChrystal in a recent meeting, “Our senior leaders – the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Secretary of Defense, Congress, the President of the United States – are not getting the right information to make decisions with. We must get this right. The media is driving the issues. We need to build a process from the sensor all the way to the political decision makers.”
The authors find artificial compartmentalization part of the problem:
The importance of an integrated, district-focused approach is difficult to overstate. The alternative – having all analysts study an entire province or region through the lens of a narrow, functional line (i.e., one analyst covers governance, another stud- ies narcotics trafficking, a third looks at insurgent networks, etc) simply cannot produce meaningful analysis. Before analysts can draw useful conclusions along these specialized lines, they must first have comprehensive reviews of everything that is happening in the various districts. With rare exceptions, such written reviews do not exist currently.10 Consequently, analysts throughout the intelligence hierarchy lack the necessary context and data needed to detect patterns of governance and other specialized topics across provinces and regions.
This approach may be novel to the current U.S. military intelligence model, but it is not unusual in other information-dependent enterprises. Consider, for instance, the sports page of a metropolitan news- paper. When the editor assigns reporters to cover football, one covers the Jets and another covers the Giants. The editor does not tell the first to write about all NFL linebackers and the second to write about the league’s punters. Determining whether teams have a shot at the Super Bowl requires analy- sis of them as a whole, not in vertical slices.
Here is a key paragraph from the conclusion section, that puts what counts most neatly:
The Cold War notion that open-source information is “second class” is a dangerous, outmoded cliché. Lieutenant General Samuel V. Wilson, former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, cap- tured it perfectly: “Ninety percent of intelligence comes from open sources. The other 10 percent,
the clandestine work, is just the more dramatic. The real intelligence hero is Sherlock Holmes, not James Bond.”
In a WSJ op-ed two astute analysts (polymath federal judge Richard Posner & a management prof) see a bureaucratic sprawl of 16 intel agencies preventing dot-connecting. They see sloth now and propose a UK-style fix:
The national intelligence apparatus of the U.S. has fewer employees than GM had in its prime, yet it consists officially of 16 separate agencies, and unofficially of more than 20. Each of these agencies is protected by strong political and bureaucratic constituencies, so that after each intelligence failure everything continues pretty much the same and usually with the same people in charge.
Five and a half years after the report of the 9/11 Commission identified the cascade of intelligence failures that allowed the 9/11 attackers to achieve total surprise, the problems it highlighted persist: We learn of multiple, separate and unshared terrorist lists; of multiple agencies (State Department, CIA and the National Counterterrorism Center) unable to combine the tips they receive; of arbitrary rules, such as requiring proof of "reasonable suspicion," rather than mere suspicion, to deny a visa to a foreigner; and of terrorists released from American custody to become leaders of al Qaeda abroad. There is the sense that nobody is in charge.
The government's response to the attempted airline bombing—the most recent failure—has been to blame every agency that had some information that if pooled would have alerted the airport authorities to the menace of Abdulmutallab. To blame all is to blame none.
We have an unwieldy multiplicity of agencies that operate largely independently. Dysfunctional bureaucratic incentives decree that an attack involving a repetition of a known terrorist procedure is the most damaging politically, so shoes are scanned because a shoe was used in an attempted airplane bombing. Now underwear will be scanned as well. The government seems always to be playing catch-up to the terrorists.
We can fix this. As with the auto industry, the moment of crisis is the right moment to tackle in-depth reform of the intelligence services. One possibility that deserves serious consideration would be a consolidation of most existing agencies into four primary agencies: a foreign intelligence agency, a military intelligence agency, a domestic intelligence agency, and a technical data collection agency (satellite mapping, electronic interception, etc.).
The authors are basically on target, but there needs to be one addition to the four main agencies: each agency should include a small center of excellence like the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA: discrete (& discreet, too) centers of excellence imbued with a culture of free-wheeling inquiry, risk-taking, all operating below the public radar screen. Then the four intel-DARPAs would share their results and analysis.
Heritage Foundation national security maven James Jay Carafano notes that compartmentalization leaves the Department of Homeland Security out of many loops in the process, such as visas (State) & passenger screening: TSA at the checkpoints but pre-flight screening is done, per direction of Congress, by the airlines. And the airlines only see the smallest no-fly list (now 4,000 names), not the larger databases (Selectee, 20,000 & Terror Watch, 500,000).
Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum divines a "jihadist elite class of wealthy sympathizers who, she concludes, resemble the Bolsheviks: highly articulate advocates of their cause, motivated by deep, abiding hatred of the societies that nurtured them. She proposes--widely--that we fund opposition groups within those societies, to counter what is proving to be highly effective jihadist propaganda. Read her excellent column in full.
One way to wage war smarter is to ban Islamist groups, who conduct war by domestic subversion, as the UK has just done with one group, Islam4UK. Given the American free speech tradition and the inclinations of the judicial branch, this will, however, prove far more difficult to effect in the US of A.
Now check out these videos of Team Obama's nominee to head the Transportation Security Administration: Christian Identity Domestic Threat (1:08) & Introductory Video (0:57). Is this the person who knows the best way to fight militant Islamist terror aimed at our homeland's airports?
Bottom Line. Unless we fight smarter, with better intel & better advocacy of our side's cause, we will continue to find our efforts frequently frustrated by nimble jihadi.
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