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U.S. President Barack Obama makes statements to outline steps the U.S. government is taking to try to shore up airline security, at the White House in Washington January 7, 2010. (Xinhua/Reuters Photo)
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by Matthew Rusling
WASHINGTON, Jan. 13 (Xinhua) -- Critics are casting doubt on U.S. President Barack Obama's efforts to streamline the intelligence process, as the intelligence community has grown considerably since 9/11 and has made such an undertaking a tall order.
The Obama administration, however, assured the public that its reforms will bear fruit and improve U.S. ability to foil future attacks.
On Christmas day, 23-year-old Nigerian national Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab smuggled an explosive device on board a U.S.-bound flight departing from Amsterdam. The bomb failed to detonate and the bomber was subdued by passengers and arrested.
Days later, media reported that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had possessed a report on the Christmas bomber before the incident occurred. His father had allegedly alerted the U.S. embassy in Nigeria that his son had fallen in with a group of extremists. But the warning was never heeded and Mutallab was never added to the "no fly" list.
As a result, Obama on Thursday ordered a slew of changes to the intelligence process aimed at enabling personnel to better connect the dots and thwart future terror attacks. The changes included more aggressively following up on leads and distributing intelligence reports more rapidly, as well as strengthening the criteria used to add individuals to terrorist watch lists.
"These reforms will improve the intelligence community's ability to collect, share, integrate, analyze and act on intelligence swiftly and effectively," said Obama. "In short, they will help our intelligence community do its job even better and protect American lives."
But some experts expressed pessimism.
"In essence what you have is such a big bureaucracy that one should not hope for a tremendous amount of change," said Fred Burton, vice president of intelligence at global intelligence company Stratfor.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) encompasses such an array of bureaucracies that it is unrealistic to expect them to be successful 100 percent of the time, he said.
Indeed, a myriad of non-military departments and sub-departments comprise the DHS, from immigration to disaster response to the U.S. Coast Guard.
"There are too many moving pieces, ongoing turf issues, dissemination of information issues and questions about who's going to follow up," he said.
Paul Pillar, director of the security studies program at Georgetown University and former CIA analyst, said: "The White House directive that was released shows the difficulty the administration is having in coming up with fresh ideas."
There are certain tasks that must be performed, and only so many ways to perform them. The opportunities for streamlining the process, beyond what has already been done, are minimal, he said.
Moreover, the Obama administration is under political pressure to show that it is taking action to patch holes exposed by the attempted Christmas day bombing and is struggling to think of plausible fixes, he said.
"The steps Obama announced are mostly just exhortations -- improve analysis, keep people responsible for following up leads, etc. -- about work that is already being done," he said.
The United States is also seeing some of the ineffectiveness of the reforms pushed by the 9/11 commission, which included the creation of two new agencies -- the office of the Director of National Intelligence and the National Counterterrorism Center, which created additional bureaucratic lines across which information must flow, he said.
But despite critics' misgivings, the administration will continue to look into what went wrong and how the bomber was able to pass the screening process and smuggle an explosive device on board an airplane.
Obama said a number of changes, from the addition of more air marshals to new security measures at airports, will ensure a safer United States.
And many said the intelligence community's record speaks for itself, as there has not been one successful attack on U.S. civilians in the United States since Sept. 11, 2001, although the Christmas bomber came close.
James Carafano, counterterrorism expert at the Heritage Foundation, said there is nothing wrong with the system that foiled 26 terrorist attacks since 9/11, rather it is leadership that is lacking.
"People need to be empowered and led instead of given a bunch of processes and supervised more," he said.
The new steps will simply slow intelligence agencies down. And Al Qaeda and its splinter organizations, constantly seeking gaps in U.S. security measures, will find new loopholes. The administration will never be able to keep up, he said.
Scott Payne, policy advisor at Third Way, said while the Obama administration has thus far fared reasonably well in foiling terror plots, intelligence agencies cannot be expected to be 100 percent successful all the time.
"Intel (Intelligence) agencies are better than they were before9/11. But we are still not where we need to be," he said. "We have done a lot of good things in terms of streamlining the intel process but there is certainly a way to go."
