David Friend: Watching the World Change (UNDIE-BOMBER FALLOUT)

The 9/11 Commission produced a watered-down, bi-partisan series of recommendations for restructuring America’s divisive, ineffectual national security apparatus that for years had been a jumble of disconnected departments often working at cross purposes. One of the committee's chief accomplishments was the appointment in 2004 of a counterterror czar (to serve as a sort of uber-intelligence-director) and the creation of Washington’s National Counterterrorism Center, conceived as a clearinghouse for intelligence-gathering, coordination, and interdiction.

How, then, did the Christmas-Day Undie-Bomber - Nigerian-raised, Yemeni-trained Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab - slip through the cracks?

It was distressing, to say the least, to read yesterday's comments from Thomas Kean, co-chair of the original 9/11 Commission, as he criticized the jury-rigged system that he had helped to create. “It’s totally frustrating,” Kean told the Times.> “It’s almost like the words being used [now] to describe what went wrong are exactly the same [as were used in 2001].”

What I found most unconscionable, as did Kean, was the fact that months ago the well-respected Nigerian financier-father of the bomber had warned American diplomats that his extremist son had gone off the rails and had become a serious threat to U.S. national security. Said Kean: “Think of what it took for the father, one of the most respected bankers in Nigeria, to walk into the American Embassy and turn in his own son. The father’s a hero. His visit by itself should have been enough to set off all kinds of alarms.”

The answer is not new commissions and showcase firings. The answer is to give meaningful incentives to bureaucrats (and to their bosses and their overseers in the executive and legislative branches) to increase the probability that they actually communicate with one another. It's sad to say, but even in a time of war, petty bureaucrats only seem to operate in their own self-interest.

January 1, 2010

UNDIE-BOMBER FALLOUT