President Obama meeting with Michael Leiter, center right, and other intelligence officials at the National Counterterrorism Center in October (UPPA/ZUMApress.com)

President Obama is scheduled to meet on Tuesday afternoon with 20 of his security advisers to receive the results of two inquiries into how Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab snuck a bomb onto Northwest Airlines Flight 253 on Christmas Day. One of those advisers is Michael Leiter, the Bush-appointed director of the National Counterterrorism Center, a hub created after 9/11 for the intelligence community’s voluminous data about terrorist plots and ambitions. While NCTC, as it’s known, has taken much criticism in the media over the past two weeks for failing to flag Abdulmutallab as a threat, NCTC has so far evaded criticism over a structural problem it still faces five years after its creation: of the 300 analysts working at the center, fewer than a dozen focus full-time on the Middle East.

[Security1] According to NCTC veterans, the NCTC’s Middle East Branch consists of eight to nine analysts at any given time. Those analysts are responsible for integrating and analyzing millions of pieces of fragmentary data relevant to terrorism in the Middle East provided by partner intelligence agencies like the CIA and the National Security Agency. They disseminate their synthesis throughout the intelligence community and into the law-enforcement and policymaking worlds, to ensure officials perceive previously hidden connections that might reveal the next al-Qaeda plot and act accordingly. And they’re responsible for analysis of a region central to the organization: Saudi Arabia, birthplace of Osama bin Laden and ancestral home of most 9/11 hijackers; Iraq, rocked by years of war and occupation; the restive Levant, Israel and the Palestinian territories, a decades-long hotbed of extremism; and Yemen, where the Nigeria-born Abdulmutallab received his explosive device from a growing al-Qaeda presence.

“There’s limited manpower and finite resources,” said a former NCTC analyst who, like several colleagues in the intelligence community, described the state of the Middle East Branch on condition of anonymity. Longstanding and government-wide shortfalls in language resources afflict the branch as well, the analyst said: “Very few people speak Arabic, and very few have ever been to the region.”

An individual familiar with NCTC’s current operations did not dispute the number of Middle East Branch analysts. But the individual said focusing on the number was misleading, because NCTC can shift analysts around from across the center to surge attention and resources to deal with an emerging problem. “There might be eight or nine people that are deemed those particular experts, but across the Center, there’s a heck of a lot more that can be drawn upon,” the individual said, citing more-experienced supervisors and additional NCTC branches and groups working on related issues that can contribute as needed.

But several NCTC veterans, none of whom would agree to be identified because of their ongoing involvement with the intelligence community, discussed chronic shortfalls of manpower at the agency. One NCTC veteran described a single analyst — “yes, singular,” a different former NCTC analyst emphasized — who until recently was responsible for analysis of terrorism on the entire Arabian Peninsula, apparently during the time when al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula has emerged as what Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Monday termed a “global threat.”

A different U.S. intelligence official pushed back on the importance of that seeming shortfall. “Yemen has been an area of significant focus by this organization and others around the government,” the intelligence official said. Pointing to the eight or nine analysts on the Branch is “wholly misleading,” because others in NCTC work on aspects of terrorism analysis for al-Qaeda not specifically related to Yemen or the Middle East that assist understanding al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. But the official continued, “Now, there may be one primary person who’s looking at a particular area or has particular expertise or is a regional expert or is a country expert, OK, let’s say that’s ‘The Person.’ But with all that’s been going on in that country” — a reference to U.S. intelligence-assisted strikes on the terrorist organization — “it is totally wrong to think that there is just one person that’s watching Yemen.”

Since passengers and crew aboard Northwest Flight 253 prevented Abdulmutallab from detonating a device hidden in his underwear, overwhelming media and political attention has focused on how NCTC synthesized fragmentary bits of data acquired about Abdulmutallab and the organization that outfitted him, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the Yemen-based franchise of the terrorist network. The most specific piece of information NCTC received came from officials at the U.S. embassy in Abuja, Nigeria, after the would-be bomber’s father told embassy staff on Nov. 19 that Abdulmutallab might be an extremist. An interagency process led by NCTC determined that the information did not meet an agreed-upon standard of “specific derogatory information leading to reasonable suspicion” necessary to place Abdulmutallab on a terrorist database maintained by the FBI, a precursor to placement on the no-fly list. Frustrated intelligence officials have wondered what they were really supposed to do with those data fragments, and have expressed bitterness over becoming a media scapegoat — and having other government departments blame them for the Christmas Day near-attack.

John Brennan, Obama’s senior White House counterterrorism adviser and the first director of NCTC, said on ABC’s “This Week” that a positive sign in the Abdulmutallab case was that unlike before 9/11, there was “no evidence whatsoever” that the various intelligence agencies with information on Abdulmutallab or al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula were “reluctant to share” with each other. The trouble, Brennan said — and will likely report to Obama on Tuesday afternoon — was that “there are millions upon millions of bits of data that come in on a regular basis. What we need to do is make sure the system is robust enough that we can bring that information to the surface that really is a threat concern.”

Yet some experts question NCTC’s organizational configuration for such synthesis. Staffing the Middle East Branch with eight or nine full-time analysts is “a baffling management decision” said Steven Aftergood, an intelligence-policy analyst with the Federation of American Scientists. “Other than South Asia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, what is more important than the Middle East from a counterterrorism point of view? Where are the other several hundred [NCTC] analysts focused?”

Much of NCTC remains outside public view. Its budget is classified, a component of the budget allocated to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence — which is also not publicly disclosed.

NCTC veterans described a situation where the requirements of preventing terrorist attacks outweighed the resources provided to NCTC. “The sheer volume of intel is amazing,” one said. “The word ‘jihad’ is on the Internet every single day, it’s like [several] billion hits. And there’s no way you can track every email or cellphone conversation.”

Compounding the challenge is the questionable experience of many NCTC analysts, about 60 percent of whom are on loan from other intelligence organizations on two-year rotations. One of the former NCTC analysts described eager and dedicated colleagues being assigned to areas of expertise they did not come to NCTC possessing; as well as analysts reassigned from their areas of focus to assist with the latest crisis.

“You’re assigned to Yemen? Great, but you don’t know who the players are, what the [country's] resources are, and you don’t know where al-Qaeda fits into the whole process,” the former analyst said. Analysts will often be asked to be brought up to speed by their colleagues or predecessors. The two-year rotations are meant to encourage a culture of intelligence sharing within the 16 intelligence agencies of the U.S. government. Some intelligence professionals believe that those rotations ultimately give CIA or Defense Department analysts a broader perspective about an intelligence question. Others lament that their acquired expertise rotates back from NCTC to their partner agencies. “The nature of this organization is that people leave their jobs every two years,” the ex-NCTC analyst said.

The center’s hundreds of analysts are organized into units looking at extremist groups, various regions of the world where they operate, and questions about the groups’ capabilities and intentions. “There’s staffing that’s re-prioritized all the time. None of this is set in stone,” said a U.S. intelligence official. “People are put on particular groups and task forces that examine issues closely as they emerge. The numbers themselves are not really telling you the story of how much can be put against a particular issue or topic or threat that’s emerging.”

But with Brennan talking about an accelerated need to “bring [terrorism] information together so when a father comes in with information and we have intelligence, we can map that,” some in the intelligence community are concerned that the already overtaxed NCTC will be asked to synthesize even more fragmentary data from its contributing intelligence agencies. “What you’ll end up doing is opening up the firehose to full blast,” said one. “They’re barely able to handle what they have right now.” Indeed, Marc Ambinder of the Atlantic reported Tuesday that before the attempted Christmas attack, Leiter and the NCTC’s leadership were preparing for 2010 budget cuts. The U.S. intelligence official who defended NCTC added, “Clearly, if people believe more resources have to be applied against something, it’ll be identified” for Congress to approve, although the official said that conclusion was premature.

Aftergood, however, questioned whether NCTC’s performance merited giving the center additional funding or manpower. “There’s a tendency to say if organization fails in its mission we should give it more resources, and if it succeeds in mission we should give it more resources,” he said. “There are some other questions we need to examine first, such as: is this organization properly structured to accomplish its mission? Maybe there’s an explanation for the surprisingly small allocation of Mideast analysts, but it’s not at all obvious.”

We cannot simply suspend [American ideals of human rights] in the name of national security. Those who support torture may believe that we can abuse captives in certain select circumstances and still be true to our values. But that is a false compromise. We either believe in the dignity of the individual, the rule of law, and the prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment, or we don’t. There is no middle ground.

We cannot and we must not use torture under any circumstances. We are better than that.

True, every member of the Bush administration has said that they disapprove of torture while torturing people. So we’ll have to wait for Panetta’s confirmation hearings to know specifically what he thinks of, say, waterboarding or rendition. But as a statement of principle, that seems pretty reflective of a strong commitment to human rights and civil liberties.

The episode bothered a lot of Brennan fans in the Obama operation, where he still heads the CIA transition team. “If we’re afraid of bloggers,” one transition observer quipped, “how can we take on al-Qaeda?” Various names have popped up since for the job, including Washington lawyer and former agency general counsel Jeff Smith.

Somehow this fool doesn’t realize that by refusing to attach his name to this crap he’s demonstrating the sort of cowardice he’s critiquing. No one, by contrast, could ever call Glenn a coward.

Leading candidates for CIA director include, from left, retired Adm. Dennis Blair, former Rep. Tim Roemer and Rep. Jane Harman. (Wikimedia Commons; Flickr: miraclebaby; house.gov)

President-elect Barack Obama has enjoyed a surprisingly smooth presidential transition, with nearly all his appointees to Cabinet-level posts receiving widespread acclaim. But the exception has been the intelligence community. The abrupt departure of Obama’s probable nominee to lead the CIA has caused a bout of consternation in both intelligence and progressive circles at a time when the community is viewed as plagued with structural turmoil despite near-fundamental reorganization since 2004.

“Reform of the intelligence community is far from complete,” said Rep. Rush Holt (D-N.J.), chairman of the House Select Intelligence Oversight Panel. “There are still major gaps in basic product — intelligence.”

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

John Brennan, a longtime intelligence official and key adviser to Obama, formally withdrew from consideration Nov. 25 after Salon’s Glenn Greenwald posted Brennan quotes expressing support for the practice of rendition, in which terrorism suspects are sent to foreign countries for interrogation, many of which employ torture. When the Bush administration ordered the CIA to engage in torture after 9/11, Brennan — then a deputy to CIA Director George Tenet — was considered, for the most part, an opponent of torture, according to several intelligence officials. “I have been a strong opponent of many of the policies of the Bush Administration, such as the preemptive war in Iraq and coercive interrogation tactics, to include waterboarding,” he wrote in a letter to Obama. Yet a New Yorker 2007 story by Jane Mayer identified Brennan as a “supporter” of coercive interrogation methods.

“I don’t know John Brennan very well, but he certainly has an excellent reputation,” said Bob Graham, the retired Florida senator and governor who chaired the Senate intelligence committee from 2001 to 2002 and who served as its vice chairman until 2004. “When he said he was not supportive of those initiatives — and inside the agency was a voice of restraint and reform — I would give him a strong presumption of correctness.”

Brennan’s abrupt withdrawal from consideration for the CIA post caused an explosion of concerns among former intelligence officials. For the past two weeks, many of them have vented anonymously — and bitterly — to reporters that Obama had thrown them under the bus to appease progressives. They worry that the illegality of the Bush era has made CIA operatives, analysts and bureaucrats radioactive, in effect holding the bag in the next administration for the crimes of the current one. “Brennan’s hands were not very dirty at all,” went one typical quote, given to Jeff Stein of Congressional Quarterly last week. “He was apparently thrown under the bus because some ill-informed bloggers thought they were [dirty], and the transition folks didn’t have the will to explain that they were wrong.”

Sources within the Obama transition say that Brennan volunteered to withdraw from consideration without any pressure from the Obama team. Brennan still leads the transition’s effort at finding a new Director of National Intelligence (DNI) and CIA director.

Some progressives were struck by the intensity of the CIA defense of Brennan and the invective of some ex-officials toward the left. “I am puzzled that certain parts of the CIA now consider objections to an open defender of torture, which contributes to the decline in our nation’s national security standing, as evidence of bad faith on the part of a group of ordinary citizens,” said Matt Stoller, a Democratic political activist and co-founder of the influential progressive blog OpenLeft. “I can’t imagine that these anonymous sources represent the entire intelligence community.”

Graham urged agitated CIA officials to regain calm. “There’s been some tension [with] the CIA chafing under what’s thought to be the influence of the new administration,” he said. “People need to put those kinds of concerns behind them. There’s a need to focus on how to get the intelligence community to overcome the problems of the recent past — like 9/11 and the run-up to the Iraq war — and focus on making America more secure and giving us advance warning [of] our enemies’ action.”

With Brennan out of the picture, several names have emerged to lead the intelligence community, which has been under near-constant political fire since the 9/11 attacks. Obama is said to be considering retired Adm. Dennis Blair, a former commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific; former Rep. Tim Roemer (D-Ind.), a 9/11 commissioner; Rep. Jane Harman, former chairwoman of the House intelligence committee; and Jack Devine, a longtime CIA official and former acting CIA director. The Obama transition declined to comment on any of these individuals. Nor would it give a timeline for any announcement.

Some intelligence veterans agree with progressives that members of the Tenet era should be disqualified from consideration. “It’s just too big a cloud that hangs over [the community] — the WMD, the torture issues, it’s just too much,” said one former senior intelligence official who requested anonymity. “That has to be unwound for the agency to do well.”

Graham distinguished between the skills necessary to be CIA director and those to be director of national intelligence. “One of the principal objectives is to move the community to a more mission-orientation [model] from a functional [one],” he said, emphasizing that the intelligence community is still short on linguists fluent in the languages of the Middle East and South Asia. Another responsibility for the DNI, he said, was “to rebuild the very frayed relations between the intelligence community, the executive branch and Congress.” The CIA director, by contrast, “is more of a manager of a large, complex organization, and I think that probably calls for someone who’s had some operational experience in the intelligence community.”

Others such as Paul Pillar, a retired senior intelligence analyst, called for stability, arguing that the past four years’ worth of politically-charged restructuring has exacerbated problems it meant to solve. “Change for the sake of change is not good,” said Pillar, who as chief Middle East analyst questioned whether Saddam Hussein had ties to Al Qaeda and blasted the administration’s manipulation of intelligence in a famous Foreign Affairs article. “We have had so much disruption and turmoil associated with reorganization. The reorganization associated with the 2004 legislation creating the office of the DNI is still being shaken out with regard to whose responsibilities lie where.” Pillar added that he had no expectation that the current intelligence chiefs — DNI Mike McConnell and CIA Director Michael Hayden — would keep their jobs.

The 2004 legislation represented one of the largest overhauls in the 60-year history of the modern intelligence community. While separating the leadership of the intelligence community from its historic home in the CIA, it do not specify what the new leader’s statutory and budgetary authority are. As a result, several new arrangements have arisen. For one, the DNI and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates made a deal in 2007 to designate the Pentagon’s top intelligence official as the chief of defense intelligence, a measure to undo efforts by former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to create an intelligence czar within the Pentagon, which controls nearly 90 percent of the $48-billion annual defense budget.

Holt, who is one of the main overseers of the intelligence community on Capitol Hill, said he is in the dark about how the joint DNI-Pentagon initiative has fared. “It’s hard to say for sure,” Holt said. “Congress doesn’t have the visibility it needs, which is a longstanding problem. Most members of Congress feel that even if and when the intelligence leaders subject themselves to questioning, members of Congress have to play 20 Questions before they can actually pry out the information they need.”

Another source of concern emerging from the 2004 legislation is a recent directive that makes intelligence officials at overseas embassies directly responsible to the DNI, even though the National Clandestine Service is supposed to be under the control of the CIA. “It’s madness, it’s just crazy,” said a former intelligence official. “This is like two competing institutions. The DNI’s not [supposed to] have these resources. If every time he makes a demand on CIA there’s resentment and pushback, it’s a huge problem.” Such a resource struggle is especially unwelcome given Obama’s stated emphasis on killing or capturing Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, a mission that will require a significant effort on the part of the intelligence community’s clandestine service.

Similarly, many have worried that the DNI’s office has been neglectful of long-term analysis, instead emphasizing responsiveness to the immediate needs of policymakers. One of the earliest actions taken by John Negroponte, the first director of national intelligence, was to shutter the CIA’s Strategic Assessments Group — its in-house office for long-term analysis — and move significant numbers of analysts from CIA into the DNI’s office.

Pillar cautioned that balancing short-term needs with long-term analysis has plagued the intelligence community for generations. “There’s no structural fix,” he said. “The inbox, the demands of the day and the crisis of the day — and not just in intelligence — are always going to overwhelm and push aside longer-term missions and projects.” Another ex-official said that the CIA was losing older analysts, particularly those who took a longer view of foreign challenges, and likened the Langley Starbucks to a college campus hangout.

Holt was agnostic on whether the new leadership of the intelligence community ought to be an intelligence veteran, as some have suggested. He focused instead on other criteria. “You need somebody who has vision and administrative ability,” Holt said. “Someone who’s experienced — just to learn the acronyms of community can take a year — who knows the territory and is capable of getting intellectual distance from it. I think that you need someone who’s not timid when it comes to international interactions and even distasteful encounters, but you don’t want someone who revels in warfighting.”

As President-elect Barack Obama continues to build his national security staff, now focused on intelligence, it is possible that he might ask CIA Director Mike Hayden to stay on for a while, intelligence sources say. Much of the speculation about the CIA job has been that Obama wants a change, in part because he disagreed with the CIA’s detention policies. But officials are pushing back a little on that issue, suggesting that Hayden has been carrying out the policies backed by Congress and the president before he arrived at Langley, not freelancing on his own. “It’s unfair to blame Hayden for things that occurred long before he took the job. But he deserves credit for standing up for the folks over there at CIA, even though a lot of the stuff he has dealt with didn’t happen on his watch,” said an intelligence official. “Administration policy and American law shape what the CIA does. If the president says he doesn’t want something done, that’s it. These are his programs,” added the official.

I don’t believe this at all. This sounds like get-even pushback from embittered CIA people — of whom there are many, post-Brennan, and it’s surprised me — who want to kick progressives in the teeth. The idea of President-elect Obama being uncomfortable with Brennan for his apologies for the post-9/11 rendition program but being OK with Hayden — by his own account an architect of the warrantless surveillance program when he ran the NSA — is absurd. Someone’s having fun here. If this happens, I’ll buy you all a soda.

This all reflects the increasing alienation of the CIA from progressives, who defended the agency during the Bush years. It’s a highly worrisome development.

“The fact that I was not involved in the decisionmaking process for any of these controversial policies and actions has been ignored,” he wrote, in a letter obtained by The Associated Press.

First Read has the whole letter, which includes this line: “It has been immaterial to the critics that I have been a strong opponent of many of the policies of the Bush Administration, such as the preemptive war in Iraq and coercive interrogation tactics, to include waterboarding.”