Following Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's thwarted terrorist attempt (thanks to Northwest Flight 253's collection of bad-ass passengers, and in spite of severe security and intelligence lapses), I was left wondering how in the hell the U.S., a nation with virtually unlimited resources, could be so easily outflanked by a terrorist network with no formal military, a tenuous collection of allies, and a supreme leader who resides in a cave.
Obsessively, I sought to unravel the jumbled alphabet soup of U.S. security and spy organizations responsible for shielding us from such near-calamities. But in doing so, I've discovered a woefully inadequate and inefficient tapestry of federal intelligence agencies, whose byzantine schematic defies both logic and comprehension.
In my fruitless attempt to make sense of the post-9/11 security convolution, and to figure out what went wrong on Christmas Day, I even created my own makeshift schematic. Have a look, if you dare. It's a haphazard morass of abbreviations, notes, and arrows leading to nowhere, which perhaps most underscores the critical question of the hour, which is: Shouldn't a person of slightly above average intelligence be able to determine how the government intends on keeping us safe from would-be terrorists without having to enlist Wile E. Coyote ACME Flowcharts Ltd.?
Unfortunately, my sad, fallible chart is all we have to go on. Search Newsweek, the New York Times, the L.A. Times or even Wikipedia for their versions, but I'm fairly sure you'll be S.O.L. While you're at it, also check out the U.S.A. Today for recipes using canned pumpkin or online polls asking you your favorite color. For now, my homemade slop will have to serve as your definitive visual intelligence guide and will be hereafter referred to as D.V.I.G.
As the D.V.I.G. indicates, Abdulmutallab's attempt wasn't merely an isolated attack enacted by a lone wolf wannabe terrorist who didn't get enough breast milk and G.I. Joes when he was a child. The seeds were sown months ago, when the N.S.A., an appendage of the N.C.T.C. (who, in charge of sixteen spy agencies, is the putative center of the U.S. intelligence universe) that specializes in eavesdropping, intercepted Al Qaeda "chatter" coming from Yemen. (How they physically do this, I have no idea. I picture two shaggy agents hunkered down in a parked van, wearing headphones, and incessantly telling each other to SHHHH! No you SHHHH!) The chatter consisted of an apparent plot in which a Nigerian man would be utilized as classic Al Qaeda cannon fodder in a future U.S. terrorist attack.
The F.B.I. claims that, while this was happening, Abdulmutallab was also communicating with U.S.-born Muslim cleric - and emerging golden boy of international terrorism - Anwar al-Alwaki in Yemen where, according to TIME, he "...allegedly receives training in bomb-making." Whether or not the F.B.I. knew this prior to December 25 remains a point of uncertainty among experts and of utter befuddlement on my part.
Still, at roughly the same time, C.I.A. agents at the American embassy in Nigeria were entreated by Abdulmutallab's father, Alhaji Umaru Mutallab - a former diplomat and current bigwig in the Nigerian banking community - who insisted that his son had fallen under the understandably seductive spell of sociopathic, extremist madmen intent on turning Western civilization into an Heironymous Bosch painting. Initially, the C.I.A. was slow to react, but they and the N.S.A. eventually relayed their respective intelligence nuggets to the N.C.T.C., who somehow failed to collate. Had these pieces of information been cross checked, they would've been reported to the airlines via the T.S.A., which receives their no-fly data from the T.S.C, known more commonly in your household and mine as the Terrorist Screening Center.
Numb yet? Good. Me too. And if negligence like this doesn't put some middling Lumbergh-type's job in serious jeopardy, I don't know what would.
But prepare to be even more vexed because, while President Obama rightly states that "This was not a failure to collect intelligence...It was a failure to integrate and understand the intelligence that we already had," his chief counterterrorism advisor, John O. Brennan maintained that "This was not a failure to share information." And for the miscommunication coup de grace, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano famously claimed that "the system worked."(Napolitano has since recanted.)
As one can plainly see, the volume of federal agencies utilized to coordinate and synthesize their collective efforts, just so they can foil a single terrorist plot, has proven both cumbersome and inefficient. Experts like Brennan and former C.I.A. chief Michael Hayden claim that identifying and isolating terrorists is a complexity that requires exacting precision and multiple levels of specialization. So be it. But the current layout of government security agencies is hardly conducive to vanquishing a lean, elusive, peripatetic enemy-predator, whose moral code resides just north of Lloyd Blankfein's
That Al Qaeda creates its own perverse rules as it goes along - and that we, as a nation founded on laws, thankfully cannot - already places the U.S. at a distinct disadvantage with regards to isolating and eliminating the enemy - making the process of streamlining the U.S. intelligence model even more crucial.
If Obama insists that the near-tragedy on Christmas Day wasn't a failure of intelligence gathering but rather "a failure to connect the dots," then wouldn't removing or eliminating some of those "dots" (I'm looking at you, N.T.C.) that further distance and isolate each intelligence expert help facilitate the process of dot connecting?
To streamline the conduits between intelligence and security agencies, some of them need to be merged or eliminated altogether, to avoid redundancy; to bolster solidarity; and to alleviate conflicts of interests due to inter-agency competition - even if, in the end, it means fewer Lumberghs.