Hurdles Stymie Counterterrorism Center
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
By ERIC SCHMITT and THOM SHANKER, The New York Times (Syndicated)
WASHINGTON — The nation's main counterterrorism center, created in response to the intelligence failures in the years before Sept. 11, is struggling because of flawed staffing and internal cultural clashes, according to a new study financed by Congress.
The result, the study concludes, is a lack of coordination and communication among the agencies that are supposed to take the lead in planning the fight against terrorism, including the C.I.A. and the State Department.
. . . . . . .
The report found that the center's planning arm struggled with “systemic impediments” like overlapping statutes, culture clashes with different agencies and tensions with two formidable players: the State Department's counterterrorism office and the C.I.A.
Under President Obama, the report determined, counterterrorism issues have become more decentralized within the National Security Council's different directorates, leaving the counterterrorism center's planning arm to collect and catalog policies and operations going on at the C.I.A., the Pentagon and the Departments of State and Homeland Security, rather than help shape overall government strategy.
Phi Beta Iota: The Center for Counterterrorism is neither led well nor staffed well. This is not its fault. This is the fault of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) not managing, and the Executive Office of the President (EOP) not functioning. The U.S. federal government places too much emphasis on having political ideologues and campaign contributors in policy positions, and no emphasis at all on actually putting the best and the brightest where they need to be, with the authority they need to have. At least 50% of the government is waste, fraud, and abuse of the taxpayer trust because the government lacks a strategic analytic model, cannot manage to objective, and has sold its soul to a combination of domestic special interests and foreign intersts, neither of whom care in the least about the security and prosperity of America as a whole.
