A stunning report by the Inspector General reveals that the turf war between the FBI and ICE (Immigrations and Customs Enforcement) has resulted in major terrorism cases being dropped or ignored by ICE agents so as to avoid working with FBI agents. From USA Today:

Using a hypothetical example, the report said, if a case involved two leads — one involving illegal drugs and the other involving terrorism — an agent would pursue the drug lead in order to avoid working with the FBI. In such cases, the agent did not always forward the terrorism lead to the joint task force, the report said. 

The Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) is controlled by the FBI.    

Not only does this egregious pettiness jeopardize the country's national security, but it contradicts the very premise of the creation of the Department of Homeland Security which was to tear down the wall of bureaucracy. Instead, according to both Inspector Generals overseeing the two federal agencies, the FBI and ICE have buried terrorism cases behind that wall.

The investigation began at the behest of Iowa Senator Charles Grassley, a member of the Judiciary Committee. According to a press release, Senator Grassley sought oversight in response "to reports from retired ICE agent Joe Webber, a 30-year veteran and former head of the Houston field office."

"It seems obvious that the findings of this report justify concerns about a lack of trust between our two largest federal law enforcement agencies. They need to work together in order to do everything possible to protect Americans in the war on terror," Grassley said in a statement. 

The report is posted at http://grassley.senate.gov. 

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The Department of Homeland Security is setting up shop at the former Government Hospital for the Insane. St. Elizabeths was created by an act of Congress in 1855 and became the official government psychiatric hospital, or insane asylum. The hospital provided mental health facilities for the Army, Navy and the District of Columbia. Now St. Elizabeths will function as headquarters for the federal agency tasked with protecting the homeland from the terrorist threat. 

Explaining the move to DHS employees on Monday, DHS Deputy Secretary Michael P. Jackson wrote in an email:  

Date: April 23, 2007

To: DHS and Component Headquarters Employees in the National Capital Region

From: Michael P. Jackson [DHS Deputy Secretary]

Subject: Status of Move to St. Elizabeths 

"I want to share with you the current status of our efforts to unify DHS core headquarters facilities and our operating components at the St. Elizabeths West Campus in Southeast Washington, D.C.

When DHS was created in 2003, it was appropriately built with dispatch. Today, more than 60 buildings housing DHS employees are scattered widely throughout the National Capital Region (NCR). A single campus facility will allow us greatly to improve our operational effectiveness and enhance our ability to act as a nimble and integrated team." 

Will agencies within DHS begin sharing information with each other now that they will be on the same campus? Or will the new campus be just another bureaucratic fortress with really high walls? 

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Amir Mohammed Meshal, 24, is an American from Tinton Falls, New Jersey. According to US officials, he was captured three months ago in Africa while escaping from war-torn Somalia. At the time, Meshal was believed to be an Al-Qaeda loyalist fighting with local Islamic militia. He was detained in Kenya and then in Ethiopia where he was questioned by US officials including the FBI. Recently the State Department cleared Meshal of terrorism charges and conceded that he was free to go home. 

"We hope to see him reunited with his family very soon," deputy State Department spokesman Tom Casey told the Associated Press. But that's not what happened. There was no immediate family reunion because Meshal was on the Department of Homeland Security's no-fly list.

Getting on the no-fly list is one thing. It's easy if your name is Richard Johnson or if you are one of the dead 9/11 hijackers, or if you are Evo Morales, the President Bolivia. But getting off the no-fly list is an entirely different story — even if you are a medium-profile, former detainee mysteriously hanging out during a civil war in one of the most dangerous hot beds of Islamic fundamentalism in the world: Somalia.

The President promised the American people that in creating The Department of Homeland Security the "Wall of Bureaucracy" would come down. Instead, those walls are surely getting higher as is evident in this confusing article from The Associated Press:

The real question is, when was Meshal put on the no-fly list and why? Before he was captured, when he was in prison, or after he was released? These questions will not be answered by Homeland Security because anything having to do with the no-fly list is classified. 

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January 8, 2007: on the eve of the 110th Congress’ first one-hundred working hours, promises are in the air. Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, says Congress will pass measures including ethics reform, reduced dependence on foreign oil and adoption of the 9/11 Commission’s recommendations — ones that were originally made in the summer of 2004. In April 2006, nearly two years after the original 41 recommendations were made, former commission Chairman Thomas H. Kean and Vice Chairman Lee Hamilton had this to say about what had (or had not) been done:

To that end, Kean and Hamilton then announced that Barnes & Noble was reprinting the final report, 9/11 Commission Report: Fully Updated with Controversial Third Monograph and Never-Before-Published Progress reports from the 9/11 Commissioners. The hope was that the new edition would “help rekindle citizen interest in our recommendations.” The report is 816 pages long, costs $9.95 and is worth every cent. One of the key points in the new edition was Congressional oversight. Reforms are necessary, it says, but oversight is imperative. And yet according to Kean and Hamilton, post-9/11 oversight reforms were — and remain — among those “sidestepped” by the federal government.

Take the no-fly list for example. The no-fly list was touted by the Department of Homeland Security as a hallmark of aviation security reform. It was a great idea in theory — to keep dangerous people off airplanes — but there was no oversight committee around to monitor and question its effectiveness. Instead, it took the excellent work of two investigative journalists, Susan B. Trento and Joseph J. Trento, together with 60 Minutes, to reveal what Congress ignored: the no-fly list is a paper tiger. That dead people are on the list and that everyone named ‘Robert Johnson’ is on the list is outrageous. But that many top level terrorists have been deliberately left off the list is a travesty. The rationale, according to one CIA official, now retired, goes like this (from the Trentos’ book, Unsafe at Any Altitude):

Why did it take two journalists and a TV show to do what Congress could not, or would not, do? Kean and Hamilton weigh in: “turf battles have kept the oversight committees weak. To protect our country, as well as our civil liberties, Congress must perform robust oversight of the Executive branch.”

Here’s to robust oversight, Madam Speaker.

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What is ‘The Wall?’ In his riveting and necessary book, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and The Road to 9/11, Lawrence Wright writes about ‘The Wall’ – the bureaucratic barrier that stood between intelligence agencies before 9/11. This barrier ruined any chance to stop the 9/11 attack. ‘The Wall’ kept important information from getting to where it needed to go. Wright gives lots of supporting evidence to this end, but one image stands alone:

In Madagascar, while trying to intercept phone calls of 9/11 mastermind Khaled Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), FBI agents grow increasingly frustrated by the fact that the CIA won’t share the critical information it already has about KSM. So the FBI agents purchase a boom box and a CD of Pink Floyd’s The Wall. Whenever one of them feels that the bureaucracy is too much to bear, the agent puts the Pink Floyd CD in the boom box, picks up the phone and dials the CIA. Then he presses ‘play.’ With the phone to the boom-box speaker, the FBI agent lets the morbid, depressing vocals of Roger Waters express to the CIA agent exactly how he feels: “All in all its just another brick in the wall….”

Further Reading on The Wall:

• The original, unclassified Wall Memo written by Deputy Attorney General Jamie S. Gorelick to US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Mary Jo White.
• Andrew C. McCarthy on The Wall.
• Charles Hurt and Stephen Dinan on The Wall.
• Annie Jacobsen on The Wall.

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