According to Jeanne A. Butterfield, executive director of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, 'There is a much bigger danger than we have ever seen in our history of innocent people being rounded up and held on suspicion that they did something and never having their day in court.'
Most Americans understand why. The country has just experienced the most shocking day of terror in its history, and the culprits can be traced to recent immigrants who, in most cases, did not even attempt to conceal their identities. Closing the borders and arresting suspected immigrants would be the obvious knee-jerk reaction.
Unfortunately, a knee-jerk reaction is not always the most intelligent response to a crisis. Giving the Immigration and Naturalization Service an unprecedented new power to detain immigrants indefinitely may assuage worries over domestic security, but it avoids a difficult question: Why can't the INS identify suspected terrorists without detaining every single Arab immigrant? The answer points to what may be the biggest risk to American security'an inefficient and bloated bureaucracy.
Evidence from the investigation suggests that if various government agencies had communicated more efficiently, the terrorists' plot would have been revealed a week before the attacks. The CIA knew two months in advance that Osama bin Laden's organization was planning another attack. In response, the CIA notified the INS to deny visas to certain suspects it thought had contact with bin Laden. The INS responded by telling the FBI that the suspects identified by the CIA had already been allowed into the country. This prompted the FBI to request wiretaps from the Justice Department to monitor the suspects and increase surveillance. The FBI never found the suspects, who turned out to be some of the 19 terrorists responsible for the Sept. 11 attack.
It took almost two months for the FBI to actively begin monitoring the suspects on the CIA's terrorist watch list. There was no known communication of between CIA experts who had information that suggested an imminent attack by bin Laden and FBI agents conducting national security investigations. Poor bureaucratic communication is at least partly responsible for why the United States was unprepared for the attack.
Although it may seem that curbing civil liberties and eliminating legal protection for immigrants will address America's failed domestic security, a more effective approach may be establishing a powerful Office of Homeland Security that can eliminate unneeded bureaucracy. Policymakers were already addressing the need for this agency several months before the attack took place. The U.S. Commission on National Security, a panel established in 1998 by President Clinton and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, concluded in a report released in January, 'A single person, accountable to the president ... should be responsible for coordinating and overseeing specific U.S. government activities related to homeland security.'
It is vitally important that President Bush grant Gov. Tom Ridge of Pennsylvania, the new director of the Office for Homeland Security, the authority to streamline interagency communication and eliminate red tape. Ridge's office must be able to expedite investigations conducted by the FBI, INS and Justice Department. For example, in order to conduct a wiretap, currently the FBI must ask permission from the Justice Department, which grants permission based on a ruling from a special surveillance court. The process can take more than a week to complete.
To overcome these inherent flaws in the system, Ridge will need a full department with adequate funding. According to Gary Hart, co-chairman of the U.S. Commission on National Security, 'He should not be merely a homeland czar. No homeland czar can possibly hope to coordinate the almost hopeless dispersal of authority that currently characterizes the 40 or more agencies or elements of agencies with some piece of responsibility for protecting the homeland.'
The U.S. government has appointed czars in the past for energy issues and the 'drug war,' but both agencies have been criticized for being impotent due to a lack of funding. Currently, the White House has fallen far short of the ideal envisioned by Hart. Ridge may have a cabinet-level position, but there has been no effort made to give him the resources to form his own department.
Instead, Attorney General John Ashcroft has spent the majority of his time attempting to convince Congress that America's real Achilles' heel is its civil liberties. I wonder if Achcroft realizes the irony of scaling back domestic freedoms for security reasons while carrying out a military campaign named 'Enduring Freedom.' I guess you can't blame him; the Pentagon probably doesn't communicate all that well with the Justice Department.
