21st CENTURY CONCERNS OF U S INTELLIGENCE ORGANIZATIONS
The recently released 9/11 Commission Report outlined forty-onerecommendations necessary to protect the United States from threats to thewelfare of American citizens in the twenty first century. President Bushannouncing plans to establish the National Counter Terrorism Center (NCTC)new position of National Intelligence Director (NID) to better coordinateinformation sharing between various intelligence agencies. Critics point out that President Bush failed to grant sufficientproposed position and that the NCTC is nothing much more than a new namejoint CIA-FBI Terrorist Threat Integration Center, established last yearproblems surfaced concerning the sharing of intelligence informationresources between domestic law enforcement authorities and intelligenceUnder the President's conceptualization, the NCTC might closely resemblestructure of the Office of National Drug Control and the NID would havepower no greater than the current CIA chief, which, according to those
American intelligence organizations must ensure that their combinedresourcesare integrated with law enforcement agencies throughout the world to avoida muchcostlier repeat of the intelligence dissemination failures without whichthe attack on theWorld Trade Center could never have succeeded. Presently, thousands ofunscreenedcargo crates are offloaded daily at sea ports within blocks of Ground Zerobecause facilitiesand funding are insufficient to perform more than random examinations of averysmall percentage of them. Since thedisintegrationof the Soviet Union, the threat of war between "superpowers" has beeneliminated andthe threat of any nation-sponsored attack on the U. Paradoxically, the same situation may have dramatically increased thepotentialavailability of weapons grade fissile material to terrorists who would nothesitate todeploy them against domestic targets, possibly killing hundreds ofthousands ofAmericans and utterly dwarfing the tragic events of September 11, 2001 inmagnitude(Dershowitz, p. Intelligence resources mustbe usedto infiltrate moderate Islamic elements in order to support them andfurther distancethem from radical fundamentalists. Similar charges from otheragents within theFBI Foreign Intelligence Office establish a definite link betweenindependent funding ofdifferent agencies and administrative efforts to undermine the productivityof ongoinginvestigations in order to justify increased funding. According to many analysts, intelligence efforts must broaden theirperspectiveand address Islamic terrorism in light of the spread of radicalfundamentalist ideologyrather than as an issue of responding to terrorist organizations as thoughthey aremerely matters of intelligence and law enforcement (Andrews, 2004). Onthe other hand, the focus on potential terrorist targets and methodologiessince 2001has identified numerous disturbing pieces of intelligence concerning othervulnerabilities of the United States to domestic terrorist attacks. Particularly troubling is the fact that the information at issue inthe Germancase pertained to the degree of collaboration between domestic terroristorganizationsand Al-Qaeda, since all indications suggest that the future of thiscountry's safetydepend, in large part, on the expansion of the entire intelligence networkintogeopolitical sources of domestic terrorism. The Islamic world is already in tremendous turmoil with politicalassassinationsin Iraq, Al-Qaeda attacks against fellow Muslims in Saudi Arabia andrepression ofIranian moderates only widening the rift between moderate and extremistMuslims. Ultimately, it is notpossible tothwart every possible threat to any possible domestic target for terrorism. What is needed is an agency dedicated to wage a war of ideas on ageopolitical scale tostrip away the "mantle of Islamic legitimacy" enjoyed by Bin Laden andsympatheticelements within greater Islam (Andrews, 2004).
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Acceptance Essays
