Nice digs, but a tough gig.
President Obama’s preliminary report on the intelligence community’s failure to prevent the attempted Christmas day attack will be released sometime today. It will almost certainly lay much of the blame on the National Counter Terrorism Center (NCTC).
The NCTC was originally established via Executive Order by President Bush as the Terrorist Threat Integration Center in 2003. It was later formalized as the NCTC in ensuing intelligence reform legislation, but the mission remained essentially the same – to integrate terrorist threats and prevent them from being realized.
By this standard, the NCTC certainly under-performed over the holidays. The NCTC’s failure could be the result of at least two separate problems:
1. Other agencies and departments are not providing NCTC with the right information at the right time; and/or
2. NCTC analysts are not analyzing the available information very well.
There is reason to believe that both problems contributed to this incident. Since the passage of the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 (IRTPA), critics have decried the lack of authority vested in the Director of the NCTC and his/her principal patron, the newly-created Director of National Intelligence. If they can’t compel cooperation from other agencies, they have nearly impossible jobs.
More disconcerting still, prominent reports – including that of the Robb-Silberman Commission – have suggested that the NCTC has had trouble attracting and retaining the best analysts from across the intelligence community. Either way, the fallout from this unfortunate incident will provide the first in-depth public assessment of the effectiveness of the intelligence system created by the IRTPA of 2004. That’s not a bad thing at all.
