Intelligence effort named citizens, not terrorists

EILEEN SULLIVAN

MATT APUZZO

Asso­ci­ated Press

WASHINGTON — A multibillion-dollar information-sharing pro­gram cre­ated in the after­math of 9/11 has improp­erly col­lected infor­ma­tion about inno­cent Amer­i­cans and pro­duced lit­tle valu­able intel­li­gence on ter­ror­ism, a Sen­ate report con­cludes. It por­trays an effort that bal­looned far beyond anyone’s abil­ity to control.

What began as an attempt to put local, state and fed­eral offi­cials in the same room ana­lyz­ing the same intel­li­gence has instead cost huge amounts of money for data-mining soft­ware, flat screen tele­vi­sions and, in Ari­zona, two fully equipped Chevro­let Tahoes that are used for com­mut­ing, inves­ti­ga­tors found.

The lengthy, bipar­ti­san report is a scathing eval­u­a­tion of what the Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­rity has held up as a crown jewel of its secu­rity efforts. The report under­scores a real­ity of post-9/11 Wash­ing­ton: National secu­rity pro­grams tend to grow, never shrink, even when their money and man­power far sur­pass the actual sub­ject of ter­ror­ism. Much of this money went for ordi­nary local crime-fighting.

Dis­agree­ing with the crit­i­cal con­clu­sions of the report, Home­land Secu­rity says it is out­dated, inac­cu­rate and too focused on infor­ma­tion pro­duced by the pro­gram, ignor­ing ben­e­fits to local gov­ern­ments from their involve­ment with fed­eral intel­li­gence officials.

Because of a con­vo­luted grants process set up by Con­gress, Home­land Secu­rity offi­cials don’t know how much they have spent in their decade-long effort to set up so-called fusion cen­ters in every state. Gov­ern­ment esti­mates range from less than $300 mil­lion to $1.4 bil­lion in fed­eral money, plus much more invested by state and local gov­ern­ments. Fed­eral fund­ing is pegged at about 20 per­cent to 30 percent.

Despite that, Con­gress is unlikely to pull the plug. That’s because, whether or not it stops ter­ror­ists, the pro­gram means polit­i­cally impor­tant money for state and local governments.

A Sen­ate Home­land Secu­rity sub­com­mit­tee reviewed more than 600 unclas­si­fied reports over a one-year period and con­cluded that most had noth­ing to do with ter­ror­ism. The panel’s chair­man is Demo­c­rat Carl Levin of Michi­gan, the rank­ing Repub­li­can Tom Coburn of Oklahoma.

“The sub­com­mit­tee inves­ti­ga­tion could iden­tify no report­ing which uncov­ered a ter­ror­ist threat, nor could it iden­tify a con­tri­bu­tion such fusion cen­ter report­ing made to dis­rupt an active ter­ror­ist plot,” the report said.

When fusion cen­ters did address ter­ror­ism, they some­times did so in ways that infringed on civil lib­er­ties. The cen­ters have made head­lines for cir­cu­lat­ing infor­ma­tion about Ron Paul sup­port­ers, the ACLU, activists on both sides of the abor­tion debate, war pro­test­ers and advo­cates of gun rights.

One fusion cen­ter cited in the Sen­ate inves­ti­ga­tion wrote a report about a Mus­lim com­mu­nity group’s list of book rec­om­men­da­tions. Oth­ers dis­cussed Amer­i­can cit­i­zens speak­ing at mosques or talk­ing to Mus­lim groups about parenting.

No evi­dence of crim­i­nal activ­ity was con­tained in those reports. The gov­ern­ment did not cir­cu­late them, but it kept them on gov­ern­ment com­put­ers. The fed­eral gov­ern­ment is pro­hib­ited from stor­ing infor­ma­tion about First Amend­ment activ­i­ties not related to crimes.

“It was not clear why, if DHS had deter­mined that the reports were improper to dis­sem­i­nate, the reports were proper to store indef­i­nitely,” the report said.

Home­land Secu­rity Depart­ment spokesman Matthew Chan­dler called the report “out of date, inac­cu­rate and mis­lead­ing.” He said that it focused entirely on infor­ma­tion being pro­duced by fusion cen­ters and did not con­sider the ben­e­fit the involved offi­cials got receiv­ing intel­li­gence from the fed­eral government.

The report is as much an indict­ment of Con­gress as it is the Home­land Secu­rity Depart­ment. In set­ting up the depart­ment, law­mak­ers wanted their states to decide what to spend the money on. Time and again, that setup has meant the fed­eral gov­ern­ment has no way to know how its secu­rity money is being spent.

Inside Home­land Secu­rity, offi­cials have long known there were prob­lems with the reports com­ing out of fusion cen­ters, the report shows.

“You would have some guys, the infor­ma­tion you’d see from them, you’d scratch your head and say, ‘What planet are you from?’” an uniden­ti­fied Home­land Secu­rity offi­cial told Congress.

Until this year, the fed­eral reports offi­cers received five days of train­ing and were never tested or graded after­ward, the report said.

States have had crim­i­nal analy­sis cen­ters for years. But the story of fusion cen­ters began in the fren­zied after­math of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

The 9/11 Com­mis­sion urged bet­ter col­lab­o­ra­tion among gov­ern­ment agen­cies. As offi­cials real­ized that a ter­ror­ism tip was as likely to come from a local police offi­cer as the CIA, fusion cen­ters became a hot topic.

But putting peo­ple together to share intel­li­gence proved com­pli­cated. Spe­cial phone and com­puter lines had to be installed. The peo­ple read­ing the reports needed back­ground checks. Some infor­ma­tion could only be read in secure areas, which meant con­struc­tion projects.

All of that cost money.

Mean­while, fed­eral intel­li­gence agen­cies were under orders from Con­gress to hire more ana­lysts. That meant state and local agen­cies had to com­pete for smart coun­tert­er­ror­ism thinkers. And fed­eral train­ing for local ana­lysts wasn’t an early priority.

Though fusion cen­ters receive money from the fed­eral gov­ern­ment, they are oper­ated inde­pen­dently. Coun­tert­er­ror­ism money started flow­ing to states in 2003. But it wasn’t until late 2007 that the Bush admin­is­tra­tion told states how to run the centers.

State offi­cials soon real­ized there sim­ply wasn’t that much local terrorism-related intel­li­gence. Ter­ror­ist attacks didn’t hap­pen often, but police faced drugs, guns and vio­lent crime every day. Nor­mal crim­i­nal infor­ma­tion started mov­ing through fusion centers.

Under fed­eral law, that was fine. When law­mak­ers enacted rec­om­men­da­tions of the 9/11 Com­mis­sion in 2007, they allowed fusion cen­ters to study “crim­i­nal or ter­ror­ist activ­ity.” The law was co-sponsored by Sens. Susan Collins and Joe Lieber­man, the dri­ving forces behind the cre­ation of Home­land Security.

Five years later, Sen­ate inves­ti­ga­tors found, ter­ror­ism is often a sec­ondary focus.

“Many fusion cen­ters lacked either the capa­bil­ity or stated objec­tive of con­tribut­ing mean­ing­fully to the fed­eral coun­tert­er­ror­ism mis­sion,” the Sen­ate report said. “Many cen­ters didn’t con­sider coun­tert­er­ror­ism an explicit part of their mis­sion, and fed­eral offi­cials said some were sim­ply not con­cerned with doing coun­tert­er­ror­ism work.”

When Janet Napoli­tano became Home­land Secu­rity sec­re­tary in 2009, the for­mer Ari­zona gov­er­nor embraced the idea that fusion cen­ters should look beyond ter­ror­ism. Tes­ti­fy­ing before Con­gress that year, she dis­tin­guished fusion cen­ters from the FBI-led Joint Ter­ror­ism Task Forces that are the lead­ing inves­tiga­tive and ana­lyt­i­cal arms of the domes­tic coun­tert­er­ror­ism effort.

“A JTTF is really focused on ter­ror­ism and terrorism-related inves­ti­ga­tions,” she said. “Fusion cen­ters are almost every­thing else.”

Con­gress, includ­ing the com­mit­tee that authored the report, sup­ports that notion. And though the report rec­om­mends the Sen­ate recon­sider the amount of money it spends on fusion cen­ters, that seems unlikely.

“Con­gress and two admin­is­tra­tions have urged DHS to con­tinue or even expand its sup­port of fusion cen­ters, with­out pro­vid­ing suf­fi­cient over­sight to ensure the intel­li­gence from fusion cen­ters is com­men­su­rate with the level of fed­eral invest­ment,” the report said.

And fol­low­ing the release of the report, Home­land Secu­rity offi­cials indi­cated their con­tin­ued strong sup­port for the program.

Posted by AP News on Oct 2 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.