Lawmakers divided on counterterror effort

EILEEN SULLIVAN

MATT APUZZO

Asso­ci­ated Press

WASHINGTON — Sting­ing crit­i­cism from Con­gress about a coun­tert­er­ror­ism effort that improp­erly col­lected infor­ma­tion about inno­cent Amer­i­cans is turn­ing up the heat on the Obama admin­is­tra­tion to jus­tify the program’s con­tin­ued exis­tence and putting law­mak­ers who cham­pi­oned it on the defensive.

The admin­is­tra­tion strongly dis­agrees with the report’s find­ings, and lead­ers of the Sen­ate Home­land Secu­rity and Gov­ern­ment Affairs Com­mit­tee are dis­tanc­ing them­selves from the report. The review crit­i­cized the multibillion-dollar net­work of “fusion cen­ters” as inef­fec­tive in fight­ing ter­ror­ism and risky to civil liberties.

The polit­i­cal maneu­ver­ing by Sens. Joe Lieber­man, I-Conn., and Susan Collins, R-Maine, is unusual because the bipar­ti­san report was issued by their own subcommittee.

The intel­li­gence reports reviewed by the sub­com­mit­tee were pro­duced by offi­cials in the Home­land Secu­rity Department’s Intel­li­gence and Analy­sis divi­sion, which was cre­ated after the Sept. 11 attacks with the hope of con­nect­ing the dots to pre­vent the next ter­ror­ist strike. This divi­sion has never lived up to what Con­gress ini­tially hoped for.

Lieber­man and Collins were the dri­ving forces behind the cre­ation of the depart­ment. Fusion cen­ters, the ana­lyt­i­cal cen­ters intended to spot ter­ror­ism trends in every state, are held up by many as the crown jewel of the department’s secu­rity efforts.

“I strongly dis­agree with the report’s core asser­tion that fusion cen­ters have been unable to mean­ing­fully con­tribute to fed­eral coun­tert­er­ror­ism efforts,” Lieber­man said in a state­ment Wednes­day, sin­gling out six “short­com­ings” in the report. Collins issued a sep­a­rate state­ment that listed four shortcomings.

A Lieber­man spokes­woman said the report came from the Per­ma­nent Sub­com­mit­tee on Inves­ti­ga­tions, rather than the full committee.

“I know that seems odd, but this is strictly a PSI report,” Lieber­man spokes­woman Leslie Phillips wrote in an email.

The Home­land Secu­rity Depart­ment and sev­eral major law enforce­ment asso­ci­a­tions also strongly dis­agreed with the find­ings. Pulling back fed­eral money for the pro­gram would force state and local gov­ern­ments to cover all of the costs.

The depart­ment said the report is out­dated and inac­cu­rate. It cited spe­cific exam­ples of how the cen­ters have con­tributed to coun­tert­er­ror­ism efforts in major cases, includ­ing the 2010 attempted car bomb­ing in New York City’s Times Square. That’s an exam­ple the sub­com­mit­tee chal­lenges in its report.

The sub­com­mit­tee reviewed more than 600 unclas­si­fied reports over a one-year period and con­cluded that most had noth­ing to do with ter­ror­ism. The sub­com­mit­tee chair­man is Demo­c­rat Carl Levin of Michi­gan, and the top Repub­li­can is Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma.

One cen­ter cited in the 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-protected activ­i­ties not related to crimes.

States have had crim­i­nal analy­sis cen­ters for years, but the fusion cen­ters were set up after the 2001 attacks as offi­cials real­ized that a ter­ror­ism tip was as likely to come from a local police offi­cer as the CIA.

Though fusion cen­ters receive money from the fed­eral gov­ern­ment, they are oper­ated inde­pen­dently. A fed­eral law co-sponsored by Lieber­man and Collins autho­rized that cen­ters cover crim­i­nal or ter­ror­ist activity.

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

The report is as much an indict­ment of Con­gress as it is the Home­land Secu­rity Department.

“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.

One of the report’s rec­om­men­da­tions is that the depart­ment needs to do a bet­ter job of track­ing how its money is spent; that’s a rec­om­men­da­tion with which both Collins and Lieber­man agree.

Despite that, Con­gress is unlikely to pull the plug because the pro­gram means polit­i­cally impor­tant money for state and local gov­ern­ments, and Home­land Secu­rity offi­cials are adamant that the money is well spent.

In 2010, after Faisal Shahzad was caught for try­ing to blow up a vehi­cle in New York’s Times Square, fusion cen­ters exam­ined their own sys­tems to see if there were any rela­tion­ships with intel­li­gence they had related to Shahzad, said John Cohen, a senior advi­sor to the Home­land Secu­rity secretary.

Cohen said cen­ters in Florida and Vir­ginia dis­cov­ered indi­vid­u­als who had con­nec­tions to Shahzad but who were unknown to the FBI. The cen­ters shared the infor­ma­tion with FBI inves­ti­ga­tors, Cohen said, and that pro­duced addi­tional leads that are still under investigation.

But the exam­ple is one the con­gres­sional inves­ti­ga­tors con­demn. “The infor­ma­tion does not appear to have played any key role in the Shahzad case,” the report said.

Cohen also cited a 2011 case in Seat­tle in which two men approached some­one in Seat­tle about pur­chas­ing weapons. The per­son they approached hap­pened to be a police infor­mant and reported the inci­dent to his han­dler, Cohen said. The police han­dler was assigned to the local fusion cen­ter that was able to iden­tify the two peo­ple who approached the infor­mant, he said.

The fusion cen­ter did more analy­sis on the men, includ­ing dig­ging into their crim­i­nal back­grounds, deter­mined they might want to do more than just pur­chase firearms and handed the infor­ma­tion over to the local FBI-led joint ter­ror­ism task force. The men were arrested and charged with plot­ting a ter­ror attack on a mil­i­tary office in Seat­tle. While the sub­com­mit­tee did not review this par­tic­u­lar case, court records state that the men approached the police infor­mant and were spe­cific about their plans to attack a mil­i­tary office when they asked about obtain­ing weapons.

The recent Sen­ate report is not the first time ques­tions have been raised about civil lib­er­ties and pri­vacy pro­tec­tions in fusion centers.

The cen­ters have made head­lines for cir­cu­lat­ing infor­ma­tion about sup­port­ers of GOP pres­i­den­tial pri­mary can­di­date Ron Paul, the ACLU, activists on both sides of the abor­tion debate, war pro­test­ers and advo­cates of gun rights.

The Obama admin­is­tra­tion has put poli­cies in place and required that fusion cen­ters have pri­vacy and civil lib­erty poli­cies in order to receive fed­eral fund­ing. But the ACLU and other civil lib­er­ties orga­ni­za­tions con­tinue to call for bet­ter pri­vacy protections.

Posted by AP News on Oct 3 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.