Jeff Stein of The Washington Post wants to dislodge Leiter from that comfort — and, for that matter, his job.

If U.S. intelligence hasn’t completely eluded accountability — and there’s widespread doubt about that — then somebody’s got to take the fall.

Why not start with Leiter?

The full statement is after the jump.

The Intelligence Community (IC) fully supported the Senate Intelligence Committee’s review of IC information and procedures prior to the attempted bombing of Northwest Airlines Flight 253 by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.

Immediately following the attempted attack, Director Blair initiated reviews to identify IC-wide shortcomings and potential solutions. The findings of these reviews identified many of the same systemic problems noted in today’s SSCI report.

As a result of the ODNI’s internal review and the President’s January 7 directive, the IC has undertaken certain corrective actions to address these shortcomings. Specifically:

The DNI clarified roles and responsibilities among the IC’s counterterrorism functions, ensuring that any stream of threat reporting receives follow-through to its conclusion;
The establishment of a dedicated analytic element at NCTC to thoroughly and exhaustively pursue terrorist threat threads, including identifying appropriate follow-up actions by other intelligence and law enforcement organizations, and increasing the number of personnel resources dedicated to enhancing the records of information on individuals contained in the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment or TIDE;
Renewed efforts to integrate disparate data and information systems to make data more discoverable/accessible by analysts IC-wide; and
Investments in education and training, which will provide counterterrorism analysts with a career-long curriculum to facilitate integration, collaboration, and tradecraft improvements.

In light of the recent Times Square bombing attempt, Director Blair noted that, “The Intelligence Community is aggressively focused on potential threats, especially new tactics by radicalized individuals. At the same time, institutional and technological barriers remain that prevent seamless sharing of information. We can and must outthink, outwork, and defeat our enemies. The Intelligence Community is absolutely committed to that goal.”

“Prior to 12/25,” reads the report, spearheaded by committee leaders Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Kit Bond (R-Mo.) and declassified for release this afternoon, the National Counterterrorism Center, a 600-employee center inspired by the 9/11 Commission to tie together all streams of terrorism intelligence to prevent another surprise attack, “was not adequately organized and did not have the resources appropriately allocated to fulfill its missions.” That echoes a critique that NCTC veterans and whistleblowers made to The Washington Independent in January.

The committee’s report casts blame around the intelligence community for its inability to prevent Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a young Nigerian citizen educated in the U.K. and trained by al-Qaeda’s Yemen-based affiliate for the attack, from boarding Flight 253. But it finds the key bottlenecks occurred at NCTC. As we’ve reported for months, analysts within an NCTC-led process did not find that the threat information on Abdulmutallab did not meet the standard of specificity for moving him onto the FBI’s terrorist watchlist or the no-fly list. (The standard is “Specific derogatory information leading to reasonable suspicion.”)

But NCTC’s analysts, despite possessing a statutory mandate to “serve as the central and shared knowledge bank on known and suspected” terrorists, did not even “conduct additional research” to meet the “specific derogatory information” standard necessary to keep Abdulmutallab out of the U.S. — even after possessing enough information to place him on the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment database. And while the committee’s report doesn’t get specific in its unclassified summary, it hints repeatedly that there existed throughout the intelligence community enough piecemeal intelligence to meet the standard. “Analysts responsible for making the watchlisting determination did not believe they had the ability to give additional weight to significant pieces of information from the field, such as the report that resulted from the meeting with Abdulmutallab’s father,” the report states.

Its recommendations call into question the basic analytic and organizational competence of NCTC — something that its own analysts have done in interviews with TWI last January. The committee finds that for all of NCTC’s supposed analytic focus on al-Qaeda and the Middle East — though fewer than ten analysts work full-time on the Middle East and fewer than half of its 300 analysts work full-time on al-Qaeda — NCTC missed signals that al-Qaeda’s Yemen affiliate sought to attack the U.S. domestically. NCTC’s director “should ensure that all NCTC analysts understand their responsibility to connect related all-source information and disseminate all possible threat reporting, particularly reports that might help identify homeland threats,” the committee’s report states. And the director — for the time being, Michael Leiter — should “ensure that NCTC is organized and resourced to fulfill its responsibility to track, analyze, and report on all terrorist threats to the United States emanating from terrorist groups overseas.” You could be forgiven, after reading that, for wondering what NCTC has been doing for the first five years of its existence.

I’m awaiting comment from spokesmen for Leiter and for Dennis Blair, the Director of National Intelligence, whom the committee recommends should conduct his own review of the systemic failures here, “mindful of the intent of Congress to give NCTC the primary role and responsibility” for assembling all-source terrorism intelligence.

Feinstein issued that call in a Tuesday press conference following an intelligence briefing her committee received from the FBI, the National Counterterrorist Center and the Department of Homeland Security in the wake of the attempt. Her co-chairman, Sen. Kit Bond (R-Mo.), was more cautious about attributing blame to Pakistani extremist groups, though Bond appears to have napped during the briefing. While both Feinstein and Bond characterized that the extremist groups’ culpability as unproven, Feinstein said that suspect Faisal Shahzad, a naturalized U.S. citizen, received “training while he was in Pakistan, specifically Waziristan, from the Taliban.”

This afternoon, Feinstein’s office released a letter the chairwoman sent to Secretary Clinton, seeking the new designation for the Pakistani Taliban and the Haqqani Network. The full letter:

Dear Secretary Clinton:

I write to urge you to add the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) (commonly known as the “Pakistani Taliban”) to the State Department’s list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations and to consider adding other terrorist groups to the existing list of forty-five designated terrorist groups.

I believe that there are several terrorist groups – like the Pakistani Taliban and the Haqqani Network – not currently designated as Foreign Terrorist Organizations that meet the following criteria laid out by section 219 of the Immigration and Nationality Act:

(1) The organization is foreign;
(2) The organization engages in terrorist activity; and
(3) The terrorist activity threatens the security of United States citizens or the national security of the United States.

I believe the Pakistani Taliban and the Haqqani Network clearly meet all three criteria. I also believe the list of designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations must be reviewed and updated on a routine basis given the evolving and multiplying number of terrorist groups and the militant groups with which they associate that threaten our national security, especially those in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region.

Designating more groups as Foreign Terrorist Organizations would enable law enforcement and our Intelligence Community to: (1) curb terrorism financing to the group, (2) bar foreign nationals with ties to the group from entering the U.S. and remove them from the U.S. in some instances, and (3) ban material support to the group.

Thank you very much for your attention to this matter and for your continued good work to protect the national security of the United States.

Sincerely yours,

Dianne Feinstein
United States Senator

Check out this New York Times story from yesterday. It contains a new piece of information about what the intelligence agencies had collected about al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which sponsored Abdulmutallab’s efforts.

In early November, American intelligence authorities say they learned from a communications intercept of Qaeda followers in Yemen that a man named “Umar Farouk” — the first two names of the jetliner suspect, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab — had volunteered for a coming operation.

OK now. On Nov. 19, Abdulmutallab’s father told officials at the U.S. embassy in Abuja, Nigeria he was afraid his son was turning toward extremism and might be in Yemen. Between that; the “Umar Farouk” intercept; and the assorted other pieces of collection that AQAP was trying to hit the U.S. outside of Yemen or Saudi, that seems to hit the “specific derogatory information leading to reasonable suspicion” standard for moving a person-of-interest from the non-specific TIDE database at the National Counterterrorism Center to the Terrorist Screening Database at the FBI, which is the precursor move to putting him on the no-fly list. Mark Hosenball has reported that the Department of Homeland Security only checked TIDE to find Abdulmutallab’s name when Northwest 253 was in the air. Given this new information on “Umar Farouk,” perhaps they shouldn’t have needed to.

Michael Leiter, director of the NCTC, will be explaining all this to Congress in a battery of hearings this week. Let’s see what his explanation is.

President Barack Obama (WDCpix)

The National Counterterrorism Center is in for a brutal week. Its director, Michael Leiter, faces a battery of Capitol Hill hearings next week on what President Obama has described as a systemic intelligence failure ahead of the failed terrorist attack on Northwest Airlines Flight 253. But if lawmakers look beyond the immediate circumstances of how would-be bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was allowed to board a Detroit-bound jet despite a number of warning signs, there is evidence that NCTC has a host of structural problems, raising questions about its contributions to the effort against al-Qaeda.

[Security1]According to interviews with several veteran NCTC analysts, the five-year-old center, meant to be a hub for pulling together terrorism information from across the 16-agency U.S. intelligence community to better anticipate future attacks, has a cumbersome bureaucratic structure and a questionable set of institutional values. Only half of NCTC’s roughly 300 analysts focus directly on al-Qaeda — with some analyzing terror groups that do not threaten the United States, like the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka or the Hamas radicals of the Gaza Strip. Analysts are valued by the volume of writing they produce for policymakers, not the impact that analysis has on counterterrorism operations. Analysts entering NCTC from the partner agencies are assigned to areas where NCTC has vacancies, regardless of their particular specialties. And the managers who preside over analysts seeking to connect the dots — as Obama chastised the intelligence community for falling short on the Christmas would-be attack — are often inexperienced in intelligence analysis themselves.

“What counts over all in terms of promotion, recognition, etc., is the number of papers published,” one NCTC veteran said about the center’s standards for success. “It’s a numbers game.” Another added, “Publishing is the goal, not the effect of your paper.” All NCTC veterans interviewed for this piece spoke only on condition of anonymity due to their ongoing involvement in the intelligence community. Their goal in speaking out, they said, is to strengthen U.S. counterterrorism efforts by shining a light on aspects of the center’s apparent malaise.

Steve Aftergood has heard these criticisms before, particularly about agencies that value publication above impact. “That’s kind of the default mode for an intelligence bureaucracy,” said Aftergood, an intelligence-policy analyst with the Federation of American Scientists. “It’s the characteristic decline of bureaucracies. Unless there’s someone on the inside pushing them to perform, they’re going to settle into a pattern of comfortable compliance.”

It was that pattern, in part, that the NCTC was created to fix. Worried about the compartmentalization of crucial fragmentary clues about terror attacks, the 9/11 Commission in 2004 recommended creating the NCTC to serve as “a center for joint operational planning and joint intelligence,” with its analytic component tasked with developing “net assessments (comparing enemy capabilities and intentions against U.S. defenses and countermeasures)” and to “provide warning” of imminent attacks. A major intelligence reform bill passed by Congress in December 2004 formally created the center and placed it on a campus in northern Virginia under the authority of the new head of the intelligence community, the Director of National Intelligence. Its budget is classified, and its operations have attracted very little press coverage.

As a result, very few on the outside know much about the organization or its structure. The 300 analysts of NCTC’s Directorate of Intelligence are organized into five groups, each of which is run by a chief and a deputy. Each group compiles analysis from across the intelligence community on one of five topics: al-Qaeda’s overseas operations; al-Qaeda’s efforts targeting the U.S. homeland; weapons of mass destruction; an International Terror Group division looking at non al-Qaeda terror groups and their impact on various nations; and the capabilities, both known and developing, of all other terrorist groups. The two al-Qaeda-centric groups are the largest, with 75 analysts each. Each group contains a varying number of smaller branches, from which most of the specific analytic work originates. The Middle East Branch — composed of eight or nine analysts that look at al-Qaeda’s operations in the Middle East, as first reported last week by TWI — falls under the al-Qaeda Overseas Group.

U.S. intelligence officials told TWI last week that NCTC is able to surge analytic capabilities to the branches as necessary in a crisis. Two NCTC sources told TWI this week that it is far easier to surge capabilities within Groups than it is to bring analysts across them. Surprisingly, the non-al Qaeda-focused groups “are not permitted to [study] al-Qaeda,” one said. The roughly 150 other NCTC analysts focus from areas like weapons of mass destruction, weapons that al-Qaeda has shown greater interest than capability in acquiring, to country analysis in places of marginal al-Qaeda interest at best, like Australia. Analysts — those who have worked on al-Qaeda and on other threats — describe themselves as “drinking from a firehose” of information shared with NCTC by the partner intelligence agencies.

Analytic studies produced by NCTC rarely result in the killing or capturing of specific terrorists. By the time a counterterrorist operation gets “closer to that stage,” according to an NCTC veteran, the intelligence community or the military has “mobilized already. It’s never [the result of] something a single analyst puts together.” Instead, analysts’ merit is measured by the number of studies they produce for policymakers — chiefly, the president. “The customer is POTUS, that’s the only one [NCTC is] concerned about,” the veteran said. “Impact” on counterterrorist operations “is secondary.”

In response to a detailed list of questions for this article, Carl Kropf, a spokesman for NCTC, told TWI: “Our Directorate of Intelligence staff is comprised of regional experts, technical subject matter experts, and persons possessing in-depth understanding of terrorism, terrorist network operations and their affiliations, a capability that is unequaled in the U.S. Government.” While Kropf said that he could not disclose information about the NCTC’s organizational structure or operating practices, he added, “The majority of the NCTC staff is comprised of intelligence analysts and officers from multiple departments and agencies who operate in an atmosphere and environment that promotes collaboration and initiative, and one that recognizes and rewards outstanding performance.”

The agency that has played perhaps the most important role in shaping NCTC has been the CIA, the country’s largest and most prestigious intelligence service. Senior CIA officials occupy most of the NCTC’s Group Chief positions. All incoming NCTC analysts must take a weeks-long remedial course that principally teaches students how to write analytic product according to CIA style. CIA provides its analysts at NCTC with on-site management to ensure their CIA career development during their tours at the center. And it often brings  junior analysts or recruits straight out of college to NCTC, where they can relatively quickly become managers or even Branch chiefs. Some experienced intelligence professionals find the track frustrating. “You can’t hire kids out of Georgetown,” one said. “You need people with 25 years in the [CIA] or 25 years in Army intel to say ‘This [information] is bullshit; this is the good stuff.’” Some speculate — cynically, perhaps — that CIA’s career track allows the agency to keep its most experienced analysts for itself.

CIA denies the charge. “The CIA has sent–and continues to send–seasoned and senior officers to NCTC,” said CIA spokesman George Little in an email. “That’s as it should be. The partnership between the two organizations is vital.”

Once inside NCTC for the typical two-year rotation, analysts are not necessarily assigned to their core specialties. If NCTC has a particular vacancy, “you could be analyst of the Russian or Baltic militaries, and you’re thrown into al-Qaeda,” said an NCTC veteran. While the intelligence community did not have a corps of al-Qaeda specialists before 9/11 to jump into senior positions afterward — the CIA created an Osama bin Laden Unit in 1997 within its Counterterrorist Center and staffed it with a handful of employees — it remains the case, said the NCTC veteran, that “suddenly you can be a senior manager” for a branch.

Branch leaders are responsible for green-lighting analytic products and sharpening analytic focus, much as editors do for writers. Several NCTC analysts described their branch leaders as saying — sometimes for good reason — “Let’s sit on it awhile until we have more information” and “We don’t want to go to POTUS with something we’re not sure about.” While several analysts describe that role as providing important pushback and preventing faulty intelligence analysis from reaching senior administration officials, one questioned whether that focus prevented analysts from piecing together information connecting Abdulmutallab to terrorism before the Christmas attempt. “That never would have been published, because it would have been too speculative” for the president to read, the analyst said — even though President Obama said on Jan. 5 that the intelligence community “failed to connect those dots, which would have placed the suspect on the no-fly list.” Information compiled and reviewed by an interagency process helmed by NCTC contributes significantly to the process that leads to someone’s inclusion on the no-fly list.

No NCTC veteran interviewed for this piece placed any blame on Leiter, who has run NCTC since 2007. Several described him as dedicated and competent, though they questioned whether the bureaucratic structure of the center is optimized to confront the threat of terrorism. The Federation of American Scientist’s Aftergood, however, said that NCTC needed “an agency head who is capable of leading & motivating his analysts to get out of their own rut.”

iAftergood did not have a fixed judgment on Leiter, who won crucial political support last week from White House counterterrorism chief John Brennan and Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the chairwoman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. But he said that he would gain a “better sense of what Leiter’s capabilities and intentions are” during the NCTC leader’s congressional testimony next week.

“The most useful [structural] changes could be identified by NCTC leadership itself — if it’s willing to go out on a limb of self-criticism,” Aftergood said. “If it’s in a defensive crouch, then the hearings are not going to be worth much, except as a confirmation that this is not a healthy organization.”

If that wasn’t enough to secure Leiter’s job, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, chairwoman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, just put out the following statement:

Michael Leiter has my full confidence as head of the National Counterterrorism Center. He briefed me on the attack and what was known on Christmas Day, and he has been involved in the Administration’s immediate response and ongoing review. As a result of the briefing that he gave me, I believe the response to the attempted bombing of Northwest Flight 253 was well in hand. I believe him to be one of the bright lights in the American intelligence community.

To explain, a bit of background: al-Qaeda has a variety of franchise organizations, with varying degrees of command and control back to al-Qaeda’s senior leadership in the tribal regions of Pakistan. Most important are al-Qaeda in Iraq, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (the Yemeni group) and al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. Those organizations, however, have tended to focus their operations on their specific regions. The task of hitting what Osama bin Laden has called the “far enemy” — us — has tended over the past decade to fall to al-Qaeda’s senior leadership. Or so the U.S. intelligence community has long believed. Training, recruiting, funding, planning — that’s all been work the franchises reserve for their specific areas of operation.

But al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula’s use of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab changes that picture. Brennan said that he believes AQAP has a pretty direct link back to al-Qaeda Senior Leadership. Does that mean it’s uniquely focused on establishing its global reach? Or does it herald that the other franchises are moving in that direction as well? In other words, if the analytic community is now pulsed to look at AQAP, as Brennan indicated (“no one entity, team or task force” was assigned to “prioritize AQAP,” he said in the press conference), does that risk missing the next attempted coming from a different al-Qaeda franchise? After all, the National Counterterrorism Center, designed to bring together the analytic dots, has a questionable allotment of resources already.

It’s a shame no one in the briefing asked about that, but I know for a fact that Air America ace Ana Marie Cox wanted an answer to it. If only Robert Gibbs called on her!

Obama thinks the dots should have been connected. But the dots were insufficient in specificity, even when viewed in aggregation, under current rules for placing an individual on the no-fly list. And on Saturday, Michael Leiter, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, made an empty statement that gestured at taking the heat for the undesirable outcome of Abdulmutallab’s boarding the plane.

As I’ve been reporting for days, some intelligence officials argue the solution isn’t to increase the number of people on the pre-no-fly terrorism watch lists becuase that might do little aside from opening the firehose of data on full blast. For instance, here’s DeYoung:

Regardless of where fault is ultimately assessed, several officials and experts said the failure to uncover the plot confirmed fears that the massive amounts of terrorism-related information being gathered since the 2001 attacks might outgrow the capacity to manage it. The CIA, the FBI, the military, and numerous Cabinet departments and independent agencies are flooded every day with new data from the field that is available to the NCTC.

“The single biggest worry that I have is long-term quality control,” Russell E. Travers, in charge of the NCTC database of terrorism “entities,” said in a 2007 interview as his list topped 400,000 and continued to expand. “Where am I going to be, where is my successor going to be, five years down the road?”

Glenn Greenwald had more on that garbage-in-garbage-out problem yesterday in a very perceptive post.

In fairness, Obama isn’t saying “there needs to be more dots.” He’s saying there needs to be better connections of the dots. Well, OK, but that’s asking the intelligence community to really strain the amount of information there was about Abdulmutallab and al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. In practice, what the experience of the last five years has indicated is that the answer will be “there needs to be more dots.” And that, as DeYoung’s piece points out, makes the problem worse.

Today the White House will release the preliminary findings of its Flight 253 reviews. National Security Adviser Jim Jones said we’ll feel “a certain shock” when we see how many dots there were that should have been connected. And I hope there are some new dots there. Because right now, the only shock I feel concerns how the White House isn’t leveling with the public about what the standards are for placing someone on a no-fly list and is instead placing unrealistic expectations on the intelligence community.

The Intelligence Community received the President’s message today – we got it, and we are moving forward to meet the new challenges. The system did not catch Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab and prevent him from boarding an airliner and entering the United States. We must be able to stop such attempts.

The Intelligence Community has made considerable progress in developing collection and analysis capabilities and improving collaboration, but we need to strengthen our ability to stop new tactics such as the efforts of individual suicide terrorists. The threat has evolved, and we need to anticipate new kinds of attacks and improve our ability to stay ahead of them and protect America.

We can and we must outthink, outwork and defeat the enemy’s new ideas. The Intelligence Community will do that as directed by the President, working closely with our nation’s entire national security team.

Uh, “new challenges”? What’s new about terrorism? One hopes that was just a throwaway line. Because the only thing that’s going to be new here is the diminished standard for putting someone on the no-fly list. Or perhaps the increased volume of information intelligence analysts will have to synthesize. Or the acrimony and disillusionment from innocent Muslims treated by U.S. security services as potential threats — in the age of Obama, not Bush.