Disband DHS!

Charles Perrow, Research Scholar and Professor of Sociology at Yale University penned this report, which is featured in thie month's edition of Homeland Security Affairs Journal. (31 pages, .pdf)

The Disaster after 9/11: The Department of Homeland Security and the Intelligence Reorganization

It is FILLED throughout its 31 pages with many of the most difficult to deal with realities of DHS that have thus far been ignored by policymakers in Washington. Even as microscopic attention is being paid to this issue following the horrible impacts of Hurricane Katrina. I've chosen to excerpt what I found most interesting... by no means is Mr. Perrow's report intended to be a scathing rant against the Bush Administration. If that's the impression you get, its because of the emphasis I've chosen to place on certain portions. Take that for what its worth. Long and short, it makes far more sense to disband DHS, which has become the problem rather than any intelligent solution, than it does to destroy FEMA and try to rebuild what will essentially be a carbon copy of it. I highly recommend reading the entire report. But to tempt your appetite: ------------------------------------------- THE THREAT MODEL Why was the administration of George W. Bush so unprepared for a terrorist attack upon our homeland? The answer to this question is one part of the explanation for the dismal performance of the Department of Homeland Security. (The other part of the answer is that we expect too much of our organizations and the matter of predictable organizational failures, which we will come to later.) FAILED WARNINGS Before 9/11, the administration virtually ignored numerous warnings about our lack of preparedness for terrorist attacks. They came from two independent commissions, security experts such as Richard Clarke and Rand Beers, and members of the intelligence transition team who advised the new administration that further attacks on our soil were quite possible. (We had been repeatedly attacked abroad, in coordinated attacks upon two of our African embassies, our base in Saudi Arabia, the U.S.S. Cole, and at home, in the first attack upon the Twin Towers in NYC.) As late as March 2004 the White House was continuing to say that it had made counterterrorism its top priority upon coming into office in January 2001. For example White House spokesman Scott McClellan, echoing similar comments from top Administration officials, said that "this Administration made going after al Qaeda a top priority from very early on," according to a press briefing on March 22, 2004. But the White House admitted that in the face of increased terror warnings before 9/11 it only once convened its task force on counterterrorism before 9/11. President Bush himself admitted that he "didn't feel the sense of urgency" about terrorism before 9/11, despite repeated warnings that Al Qaeda could be planning to hijack airplanes and use them as missiles.3 This negligence came at roughly the same time that the vice president held at least ten meetings of his Energy Task Force and attended at least six meetings with Enron executives, presumably more pressing business than convening the task force. Similarly, Newsweek reported that internal government documents disclosed that, before 9/11, the Bush Administration moved to "de-emphasize" counterterrorism. As one of many pieces of evidence Newsweek notes that when "FBI officials sought to add hundreds more counterintelligence agents" to deal with the problem, "they got shot down" by the White House.4 The very day before the 9/11 attack, Attorney General John Ashcroft rejected an increase of fifty-eight million dollars the FBI requested to finance 149 new counterterrorism agents, 200 analysts, and fifty-four more translators. He also proposed that a Department of Justice program designed to provide equipment and training for first responders in the event of a terrorist attack be cut by sixty-five million dollars.5 The president’s national security leadership met formally nearly 100 times in the months prior to the September 11 attacks, yet terrorism was the topic during only two of those sessions. Richard Clarke’s "urgent" memo asking for a meeting of top officials on the imminent al Qaeda threat was not acted upon for almost eight months. Finally, the White House threatened to veto efforts putting more money into counterterrorism, tried to cut funding for counterterrorism grants, delayed arming the unmanned airplanes that had spotted Bin Laden in Afghanistan, and terminated a highly classified program to monitor al Qaeda suspects in the United States. Many of these failures are cited by the report of the 9/11 Commission, but one surprising admission did not make it into the report: Scott McClellan, while saying al Qaeda was a top priority from the beginning, in the same press briefing on March 22, 2004 mentioned a previously forgotten report from April 2001 (four months before 9/11) that shows the Bush Administration officially declared it "a mistake" to focus "so much energy on Osama bin Laden."6 Even when warned of imminent attacks in August of 2001, President Bush did not say “this is very serious; I want daily briefings on this and let the other relevant agencies know how seriously this must be taken.” Instead, he told the 9/11 Commission that he was “heartened” to learn that seventy full field office investigations were underway, and presumably that would take care of things and was the end of the matter.7 ~ A flurry of documents, including White House press releases dug up by the press and critics of the administration and released in the spring of 2004, indicated that immediately after the 9/11 attack there were three major initiatives by the White House. The first was an invasion of Afghanistan, to destroy bin Laden’s base and training ground; next was preparation for an invasion of Iraq, which had been on the agenda since the Bush administration took office in January 2001, according to many commentators. Protection from terrorist attacks here in the U.S. was a distant third. Even the pursuit of bin Laden in Afghanistan was not aggressive. The concern with terrorism after 9/11 seemed eerily distant. Journalist Dana Milbank reported: In the early days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the Bush White House cut by nearly two-thirds an emergency request for counterterrorism funds by the FBI, an internal administration budget document shows. The document, dated October 12, 2001, shows that the FBI requested $1.5 billion in additional funds to enhance its counterterrorism efforts with the creation of 2,024 positions. But the White House Office of Management and Budget cut that request to $531 million. Attorney General John D. Ashcroft, working within the White House limits, cut the FBI's request for items such as computer networking and foreign language intercepts by half, cut a cyber-security request by three quarters and eliminated entirely a request for ‘collaborative capabilities.’9 This background sets the stage for the homeland defense initiative that eventually resulted in the Department of Homeland Security. Despite the politically powerful rhetoric of the president and the White House about “eliminating” the terrorist threat, it was not high on the agenda. In the first nine months after 9/11, the invasion of Afghanistan was planned and carried out, planning for an Iraq invasion stepped up, and massive tax cuts for the wealthy moved forward, but only a small office of fifty or so professionals was set up in the White House to deal with homeland security. This gave Congress, and especially the Democrats, the chance eventually to foster a response in their own terms. ~ The forty or so warnings in 2000 about al Qaeda in the Presidential Daily Briefings – a much higher threat level than in 1999 – appeared to have no effect. ~ Organizational Problems: Displacement of Missions A small chunk of the new Department of Homeland Security contains the Federal Emergency Management Agency. What would happen to its traditional concern, natural disasters? The fate of programs concerned with natural disasters under DHS was a concern from the beginning. FEMA Director Joe Albaugh was asked early in 2002 about this and told Congress that the traditional role of FEMA would not be affected. But even Republican lawmakers were not convinced. Rep. Don Young (D-AK), Chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, said that if the Homeland Security Secretary wanted to redirect the agency and focus on preventing terrorist attacks, he could reduce “other [FEMA] missions and direct those resources entirely to security.” Congressman Young had good reason to think this possible. This is what President Reagan’s first appointment did, downgrading natural and industrial disasters and upgrading the threat of a nuclear attack and the rounding up of domestic radicals.31 ~ To forestall this, the chair of the Select Committee on Homeland Security, Richard Armey (R-TX) redrafted the White House proposal to keep FEMA primarily an agency dealing with natural disasters. Since the White House objected, this suggested that a displacement of its mandate would indeed be in the cards. Some senators and the highly regarded former FEMA head, James Witt, along with the Brookings Institution, were all opposed to putting FEMA in the new Department.32 Brookings foresaw the problems that were to come in a report that concluded “while a merged FEMA might become highly adept at preparing for and responding to terrorism, it would likely become less effective in performing its current mission in case of natural disasters as time, effort, and attention are inevitably diverted to other tasks within the larger organization.”33 Instead, the authors of this report urged that FEMA retain its status as an independent agency and that federal preparedness and response functions be consolidated within that agency, rather than within DHS. A serious problem has emerged that concerns the critical area of first responders – police, fire, emergency medical, and various voluntary associations and homeowners associations. The title of a 2003 Council of Foreign Relations task force report summed up the problem: “Emergency Responders: Drastically Underfunded, Dangerously Unprepared.”37 The underfunding by government at all levels was declared to be extensive. The report estimated that combined federal, state, and local expenditures would have to be tripled over the next five years to address this unmet need. Covering this funding shortfall using federal funds alone would require a fivefold increase from the current level of $5.4 billion per year to an annual federal expenditure of $25.1 billion. Nor would these funds provide gold-plated responses; they would go to essentials. For example, the Council’s executive summary gave these examples of deficiencies:

• On average, fire departments across the country have only enough radios to equip half the firefighters on a shift, and breathing apparatuses for only one-third. Only ten percent of fire departments in the United States have the personnel and equipment to respond to a building collapse.
• Police departments in cities across the country do not have the protective gear to safely secure a site following an attack with weapons of mass destruction (WMD).
• Public health laboratories in most states still lack basic equipment and expertise to adequately respond to a chemical or biological attack, and seventy-five percent of state labs report being overwhelmed by too many testing requests.
• Most cities do not have the necessary equipment to determine what kind of hazardous materials emergency responders may be facing. A study found that only eleven percent of fire departments were prepared to deal with the collapse of buildings with over fifty inhabitants, thirteen percent with chemical or biological attacks, and only twenty-five percent with equipment to communicate with state or federal emergency-response agencies.38

Furthermore, the funds that the federal government did allocate for emergency responders were sidetracked and stalled due to a politicized appropriations process, the slow distribution of funds by federal agencies, and bureaucratic red tape at all levels of government, according to GAO reports. ~ ORGANIZATIONAL USES Organizations, as I have argued, are tools that can be used by those within and without them for purposes that have little to do with their announced goals.39 A new organization such as DHS invites use. As soon as the department was established, the corporate lobbying began. Four of Secretary Tom Ridge’s senior deputies, in his initial position as assistant for homeland security at the White House, left for the private sector and began work as homeland security lobbyists, as did his legislative affairs director in the White House. The number of lobbyists who registered and listed “homeland,” “security,” or “terror” on their forms was already sizeable at the beginning of 2002, numbering 157, but jumped to 569 as of April 2003. One lawyer for a prominent Washington, D.C. law firm was up-front about corporate interests. He mentions in his on-line resume that he authored a newsletter article titled “Opportunity and Risk: Securing Your Piece of the Homeland Security Pie.”40 It is a very large pie indeed. A web page document, “Market Opportunities in Homeland Security,” introduces one to the “$100 billion” homeland security marketplace, for $500.00 plus shipping. Less exuberant in its predictions, a Frost & Sullivan report indicates the industry generated $7.49 billion just in 2002, with total market revenues of sixteen billion dollars estimated for 2009. Frost and Sullivan is an “international growth consultancy,” found at www.frost.com. A report from Govexec.com by Shane Harris, “The homeland security market boom,” published less than six months after 9/11, documents the aggressiveness of U.S. business in flocking to the new funding source. “Every good company out there can take what they do and reposition it for homeland defense,” says Roger Baker, the former chief information officer of the Commerce Department, and now with a private company.41 There were intra-government uses too. Presidential declarations of disaster areas, and the federal funds that followed, varied directly with the political importance of the area to the president of the time. Shortly after 9/11 the PATRIOT Act was passed. Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont was the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and he wrote in the criteria for distributing some $13.1 billion among the states. His committee used a formula long in use for distributing much smaller funds, one that favored the small states. The small states now resisted any change in the formula, and could do so since they had the power in the Senate. The funding was almost exactly in reverse order of the threat. (The degree of threat being used had been assessed by a non-governmental research organization using sophisticated probability models.) The ten highest amounts went to states and districts with the least threat, except for Washington, D.C., where the congresspeople live. Thus Wyoming received sixty-one dollars per person, California only fourteen dollars. Alaska, hardly a target for terrorism, received fifty-eight dollars, while New York, the target of six separate plots by Islamic terrorists in the last decade, got only twenty-five dollars per person. ~ A more serious charge than providing a barrel of pork for states and corporations is made by Eric Klinenberg and Thomas Frank in a Rolling Stones article. They argue that Katrina was the occasion for furthering a privatization policy within DHS and FEMA that amounts to an expansion of “market-based government.” Rather than label it “pork” they call it “looting,” and then document it. Some 300 corporate lobbyists and lawyers gathered in a Senate office building, barely a month after the hurricane struck, to hear Senate Majority leader Bill Frist (RTN) announce that some $100 billion would be spent on Katrina recovery (and many attendees thought that was less than half of what would be spent, as do Klinenberg and Frank). No-bid contracts followed, going to large, politically connected corporations, with so little oversight that the GAO was appalled, and the press headlined stories of gargantuan waste.51 Disasters are opportunities. It is speculated that the Katrina/Rita disaster is the large wedge for privatization and reducing social welfare spending. ~ Departure of Key Personnel The departure of seasoned terrorist experts started almost immediately. Rand Beers had thirtyfive year’s experience in intelligence; he had replaced Oliver North, who was the director for counter-terrorism and counter-narcotics in the Reagan administration. Beers spent seven months in the new department, and five days after the Iraq invasion in March 2003 he resigned. Three months later he told a Washington Post reporter of his disaffection with the counterterrorism effort, which was making us less secure. The focus on Iraq, he said, “has robbed domestic security of manpower, brainpower and money.”54 Agreeing with many, Beers saw the minimalist Afghanistan war as only dispersing al Qaeda and not pursued enough to disable it, and the maximal Iraq war as recruiting terrorists. Another disaffected expert, Richard Clarke, left in February of 2003, just before the Iraq invasion, saying the same thing. His revelations about the misdirected, under-funded, and bureaucratically incompetent response to the terrorist threat, Against All Enemies, made the best seller lists in April 2004. Others departed or would not be recruited. A New York Times story in September 2003, six months after the start of the department, reported two top officials leaving. “So few people want to work at the department that more than fifteen people declined requests to apply for the top post in its intelligence unit – and many others turned down offers to run several other key offices, government officials said.”55 The administration announced that 795 people in the FBI’s cybersecurity office would be transferred to DHS, but most decided to stay with the more reliably funded, higher-status FBI and only twenty-two joined the new department.56 Flynt Leverett, who served on the White House National Security Council for about a year until March 2003 and is now a fellow at the Brookings Institution, observed, "If you take the (White House) counterterrorism and Middle East offices, you've got about a dozen people ... who came to this administration wanting to work on these important issues and left after a year or often less because they just don't think that this administration is dealing seriously with the issues that matter.”57 (For other examples see Clarke’s Against all Enemies.) [the final 5+ pages concern the integration of intelligence into DHS, which leads into the "Dreary Conclusions"] DREARY CONCLUSIONS There is no doubt in my mind that the nation is somewhat safer since the 9/11 attack. Suspects have been apprehended, the FAA has made changes, and so has the Immigration and Customs Enforcement. But the first two were made outside of the new Department of Homeland Security, and the third easily could have been made without its appearance. The department has had very limited success in making our vulnerable chemical and nuclear stockpiles more secure. Our borders are still so porous that it would be sheer luck if a guard happened on to a terrorist. Only a few of the thousands of containers that daily enter our ports are said to be under some surveillance, though DHS has been active there. But the new surveillance (and more breaches of basic privacy, unfortunately) of populations that might harbor terrorists is handled by Justice. Billions have been spent to improve intelligence and first responder capabilities, but intelligence funding is outside of DHS. That does not leave us with much to be grateful for from [the] department. And we have no idea how many more billions would need to be spent, and where to spend them, in order to close all the holes in our open society. It is foolish to think our society will ever be safe from determined terrorists, but it is probable that we have raised the bar just enough to make it a bit more difficult for them, and this may be at least a small part of the explanation as to why we have not been successfully attacked since September 11, 2001 – over four years at the time of this writing. A better explanation for the hiatus on attacks is that the U.S. has been shown to be vulnerable, and that may be enough for the terrorists. There is room for small attacks, of course, but more pressing for the Islamic Jihad is getting “infidel” troops out of Islamic nations (principally U.S. troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan, but there are other countries) and destabilizing Islamic regimes that are corrupt and shaky, driving out all infidels and installing fundamentalist regimes. Terrorist have shown no aptitude for sophisticated attacks involving biological, chemical, or nuclear weapons.68 The London subway attack was primitive. The Madrid train station attack appears to have been motivated at least as much by previous jailing of Moroccan terrorists as by any attack upon state support of the Iraq war. Al Qaeda signed on and helped, but it did not seem to be part of their fundamental strategy. Europe is full of dense, disaffected colonies of Muslims with their own grievances. But the U.S. has none. The FBI even recently declared in a secret memo that they had no evidence of al Qaeda cells in the U.S.69DHS may even have reduced our protection from our two other types of disaster, natural and industrial. While DHS promulgates an “all-hazards” approach, hurricane Katrina in 2005 prompted inquiries that disclosed substantial funds were diverted from programs aimed at natural disasters to those focused on potential terrorist attacks. First responder funds, for example, were cut. Funds for anti-terrorist efforts (improved documentation requirements; watch lists; surveillance of mosques, ports, airports and public buildings; and many of the disturbing provisions of the PATRIOT Act) do not always help with the other hazards. Funds for bio-chemical suits and radiation detection were spent in areas where there is no industrial activity that might be a source of such danger. Still, we have a porous society, far less protected (and less inconvenienced) than our European allies and Israel. A few suicide bombers coordinated to blow up tunnels, bridges, and airports in our congested and concentrated transportation system would panic our government, and it would be easy to shut down the Northeast power grid for weeks with a few well-placed, small explosions. Suitcase bombs in a chemical plant (they are still poorly protected) could easily put seven million people at risk. Tank cars with ninety tons of deadly chlorine routinely go by or even park near the centers of our cities, Washington, D.C. included, and are vulnerable to a small bomb. A drive-by attack on the spent fuel cooling tank at a nuclear power station could release, in minutes, more radiation than is held in the core. I do not foresee attacks on these by terrorists, but weather and industrial accidents (including simple road and rail accidents) can cause them. Even if there were no foreign terrorists, these are awesome targets and DHS has done little to protect us from attacks on them. The awesome size of these targets is of our own making, made large and vulnerable for reasons of small economies and unwillingness to have a few inconveniences. Very little is being done, and can be done, about all three threats, without basic reductions of our vulnerabilities.70 Unfortunately, we cannot look to DHS for action on this score, nor, it seems, from Congress and the White House. A reduction of our vulnerabilities would also be a very difficult project, perhaps more difficult than (and almost as improbable as) a reasonable defense against terrorism, but I think not. ------------------------------------------------------- SOURCE: Charles Perrow (2006) "The Disaster after 9/11: The Department of Homeland Security and the Intelligence Reorganization", Homeland Security Affairs: Vol. II: Issue No. 1 (April, 2006), Article 3. http://www.hsaj.org/hsa/volII/iss1/art3