Spy The News! Poll Results: "What Issue is Most Important to You?"

The results are in from last week's Spy the News! poll, which asked readers "What issue is Most Important to You?"

Here are the results of our poll:

War On Terror 59%
Illegal Immigration 24%
The Economy 17%

Receiving no votes:
The Environment 0%
Social Security Reform 0%
Education Reform 0%
Crime Reduction 0%


The results of this poll were illustrative of how concerns over the War on Terror, with its current focal point in Iraq, dominate all other issues in the current 2008 election cycle. Illegal immigration, which readers tended to consider as a key component of a successful terror war rather than a stand-alone issue, expanded the total percentage of readers considering security against terrorism their highest priority to 83%. Perhaps the 17% who chose the economy confirm the political adage that people tend to "vote with their pocketbooks." It is clear that candidates seeking election in 2008 will need to distinguish themselves as credible and consistent in their positions on these three key issues.

Visit Spy the News! to participate in this week's poll: "What American Media Outlet is Most Negative in its Coverage of the U.S. Military?"

Washington Post "Arkinizes" the Army Again: Claims Army and FEMA Synonymous with Disaster

Washington Post National and Homeland Security columnist William Arkin, recently and appropriately condemned for claiming that U.S. military personnel in Iraq are mercenaries, has fired another salvo across the Army’s bow, with stray rounds directed at FEMA for good measure. Arkin’s scathing columns consistently contain sheer venomous criticism, declaring only disaster in every government and military enterprise, but never offer constructive suggestions for improvement. He has become one of the media’s primary Monday Morning Quarterbacks, whining about what the Army, or in this case the Army and FEMA, should have done differently, always after the fact when the results are obvious for everyone to observe.

Yesterday’s column, another attempt to depict the Army as incompetent, included what Arkin apparently viewed as the ultimate insult he could heap upon the Army: likening the Army to FEMA, the federal agency that was blamed by Louisiana’s inept leaders for their own failures to evacuate and assist storm victims. With the help of willing media who seized upon haphazard rescue efforts as somehow being President Bush’s fault, blame for all Katrina-related tragedies and failures was directed at FEMA, which continues to wear, unfairly, the labels of “gross neglect,” “incompetence,” “disaster,” and “bureaucratic tragedy,” to name only a few terms Arkin associated with FEMA. Army personnel should closely observe what Arkin wrote about FEMA, because he painted the Army with the same unfairly tainted brush, implying that whenever FEMA or the Army are involved, disaster is sure to follow.

Arkin refers to FEMA trailers and mobile homes that could have helped the homeless in Louisiana but were under-utilized which are now being sold at auction, and cites this as an example of FEMA’s incompetence. What Arkin conveniently omits, however, is that the trailers were available and in the process of shipping to New Orleans, but the New Orleans City Council, over Ray “chocolate city” Nagin’s objections, REFUSED to allow the trailers into areas FEMA had determined were suitable for their installation. The fact that Nagin, who did absolutely nothing to prepare his city for such a storm despite numerous FEMA and National Weather Service warnings, was literally pleading with his own city council and stubborn New Orleans residents who didn’t want trailers in their neighborhoods, is a clear refutation of Arkin’s condemnation of FEMA. Were the trailers a perfect solution? No, but what would have been? It is true that many of the trailers later developed maintenance problems due to excessive usage. The ideal solution would have been the city of New Orleans and the State of Louisiana utilizing school buses and other available resources days in advance to evacuate those at most risk. Instead, images of school buses submerged in Katrina floodwaters demonstrated where the real incompetence occurred: in the New Orleans city government and the Louisiana governor’s office.

For a true account of why the trailers, which FEMA spent $2.6 billion to acquire, turned into a fiasco, read NBC correspondent Ron Mott’s report from December 2005 titled “Empty Trailers, Reluctant Neighbors: FEMA has the mobile homes, but no one can agree where they should go.” As this report from a network that Arkin surely considers credible confirmed, “500 trailers are arriving every day, but they just sit there because no one wants them in his backyard.” Racial prejudice and fears of crime and traffic, all exhibited by suburban residents (not the Bush administration, despite Spike Lee’s film), kept the trailers out of New Orleans, not FEMA neglect.

It is unfortunate but not surprising that Arkin ignores the only actual valid comparison that can be made between FEMA and the Army: neither can deploy nor utilize its resources to benefit others without executive orders to do so. FEMA could not provide the mobile homes to those who needed them because the New Orleans City government refused to permit it. Likewise, the Army could not prepare for or deploy in Iraq in the manner it preferred because elected and appointed civilian executives chose otherwise. Arkin compares FEMA “incompetence” and lack of preparedness for future disasters with the Army’s alleged lack of preparedness for fighting wars in the Middle East, citing inadequate Arabic language training, and failure to understand Iraqi Army dynamics as reasons “the mess we are in.” According to Arkin:

But the Army, the "professionals," the military men with experience and doctrine and integrity, are not only supposed to have the backbone to speak up, but also the ability to see the right way.

Throughout the 1990's up until today, instead of preparing the institution - training and equipping - to fight in the Middle East and then specifically in Iraq, the Army's mind seems to have been elsewhere. . . .

As current Iraq commander Gen. David H. Petraeus said in his own confirmation hearings, "We took too long to develop the concepts and structures needed to build effective Iraqi Security Forces..."

The "we" here is the Army. These are Army decisions.

Arkin makes cursory reference to former Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and former Ambassador Bremer as having made poor decisions, but he places most of the blame on the Army for not having “the backbone to speak up.” Unfortunately, merely speaking up rarely convinces civilian executive leadership to follow the advice given. This lesson is perhaps the only comparison that may be valid between Vietnam and the Iraq War. Military leaders, including Senator John McCain’s father, were well acquainted with and loudly advocated effective strategies but were routinely denied permission to wage a full war because civilian leadership was determined to fight a limited war while grappling with anti-war elements on the political front. There is wisdom in our constitutional division of military command authority, with an elected official as Commander in Chief, but there is also much opportunity for political goals to interfere with and ultimately prevent victory.

Military leaders during the Vietnam War, for example, viewed arms and supply shipments from Russia and China into North Vietnam as intolerable and warned that the war could not be won without stemming the flow from those nations. The civilian leadership in Washington feared that destroying weapons shipments would incite Russia and China into joining the war, and refused to permit any actions against the shipments. As a result, the North Vietnamese received a steady supply of advanced anti-aircraft systems and other important weapons which assured the successful air and land defenses of Hanoi and other major cities. Senator McCain was shot down by those advanced air defenses and suffered 5 years of beatings in POW camps because of that civilian leadership decision. Arkin seems to believe that the military needs to “speak up” and is responsible for not doing so, but clearly when the ultimate decision making power rests in the civilian authority, that is also where ultimate responsibility for the result should rest.

I wrote extensively in a previous post about military strategy decisions in Iraq made largely for political reasons by civilian leadership, specifically the Civilian Provisional Authority (CPA), headed by Ambassador Bremer. Most of these decisions were not the preferred strategy of the Army. Apparently it is difficult for an anti-military journalist like Arkin to accept the idea that our military rarely is permitted to engage enemies on the terms and with the level of force our military recommends. The Army has one goal: victory, with whatever force is necessary to achieve it. Civilian leadership, elected or appointed usually possesses entirely separate political goals, with victory defined by very narrow political accomplishments.

As is evident in one of our major parties, among elected officials victory in Iraq is neither expected nor apparently even desired. No amount of “speaking up” by the Army will convince the current Democrats in Congress that this war can be won. They voted unanimously to approve General David Petraeus to take command of the war and days later were working to pass a non-binding resolution opposing President Bush’s troop surge that General Patraeus recommended and was selected specifically to implement. They are simply too heavily invested politically in making sure this war ends in failure while pinning that failure on President Bush and the Republican Party to listen to any “speaking up” from the Army.

While journalists like Arkin make factually incorrect comparisons between FEMA and the Army, ascribing disaster to both entities, it is important to remember that both are restricted to act only when ordered to do so by civilians. They are also similar in that both rely on elected officials to determine their budgets, and therefore their ability to improve equipment, train personnel, or expand duties. Criticism from without and within is important to the improvement of any government agency or armed services branch. However, Arkin’s attempt to blame the Army for decisions made by civilian leaders, or as he called it, to “FEMA-ize” the Army, offers nothing constructive to efforts to improve FEMA or the Army.

Arkin’s well publicized and roundly criticized statement that our military personnel in Iraq are “mercenaries” because they volunteer, are paid, and receive extensive benefits has its parallel in the media. Arkin and his ilk are propagandists rather than journalists because they volunteer to work in their field, are paid to bash the military and the Bush administration regardless of facts, and receive extensive benefits from their employers for doing so. Perhaps the U.S. military should replace “criticized” with “Arkinized” when referring to inaccurate and venomous media reporting of its personnel or actions.

Proposals Calling for New Domestic Intelligence Agency Based on MI5 Ignore Similarities with FBI

With every new story about “incompetence” or “intelligence failures” within our federal law enforcement or intelligence agencies, citizens and newspaper editors step forward to cry for a new intelligence agency to be established in the U.S. to replace the FBI as the lead agency for domestic counterterrorism investigations. In the wake of Friday’s released unclassified report revealing that the FBI under reported its use of National Security Letters (an exigent circumstance records request similar to an administrative subpoena), it did not take long for critics, unfortunately including the editors at the Wall Street Journal, to expand the rhetoric beyond the National Security Letter reporting issue and call for a new agency that will magically succeed where they perceive the FBI has failed.

According to the WSJ editors:

This is another fiasco for the FBI, which may simply be incapable of effective counterterrorism. Every independent group that has looked into the FBI--including the Robb-Silberman commission--has found that the agency is failing in that duty. Whatever discipline is handed out for this latest foul-up, the country needs to debate again whether domestic antiterror functions should be taken from the FBI and given to a new agency modeled after Britain's MI5. The FBI's culture of crime-fighting and case-building to win convictions may be incompatible with the prevention and intelligence demands of counterterrorism.

The WSJ editors omitted the important fact that the Robb-Silberman commission, while highly critical of the FBI, did not advocate the creation of a new agency to take over the FBI’s counterterrorism duties. The commission reported that the FBI had agreed to make significant changes to address its shortcomings by 2010, and thus withheld any proposal for a new agency until after 2010. Well into 2007, and with the FBI in the news again for administrative errors, it is unclear what, if any, progress the FBI is making toward restructuring itself before its detractors take the reigns of reform with relish in 2010.

Having experience in these fields, I am fully aware of the shortcomings of the FBI and other federal agencies in the effort to prevent and investigate terrorist activities and further to prosecute Americans linked to terrorism. Mistakes, at times grave but usually unintentional, have been and continue to be made by the FBI and other agencies. That is the nature of human intelligence and law enforcement, and these mistakes certainly deserve attention and scrutiny in the spirit of suggested improvement. However, to point to MI5 as the panacea model that will solve America’s domestic counterterrorism woes ignores two critical points: First, MI5 has experienced many of its own frequent and very public failures; second, forming new government agencies is almost never the answer to a governmental reform problem.

There are numerous examples of MI5 intelligence errors, including the infamous "Cambridge 5," a massive internal penetration of MI5 by Cambridge University students recruited and handled by the KGB. MI5 was also criticized for a perceived failure to warn Britains of the targeting of entertainment spots in Bali prior to the 2002 Bali bombing that killed 24 British Citizens, among many other victims. MI5 critics likewise believed the agency should have made connections among individuals later discovered to have perpetrated the London Tube bombings in July 2005. One of the bombers reportedly visited Britain just weeks prior to the attack but was never placed under surveillance by MI5. For a fascinating look into MI5 that FBI critics should examine is Spy Catcher: The Candid Autobiography of a Senior Intelligence Officer. These are merely two examples out of many in which MI5 was criticized for precisely the same shortcomings the FBI waded through after 9/11.

Perhaps MI5’s organizational structure is superior, but its efficacy is questioned by the British government and press with nearly as much zeal as the FBI experiences from Congress and the American media. It is a truism among intelligence and law enforcement personnel that your mistakes are front page news, while your successes are met with a shrug of the shoulders. Failure is always a bigger story than success. If you successfully identify and prevent an attack, you are simply told “thanks for doing your job.” If you make a mistake, the vultures immediately squawk for your duties to be given to someone else, preferably a new entity with no record of failure or success to tarnish its pristine reputation.

We have been down this road before, as recently as post 9/11 with the establishment of the behemoth Department of Homeland Security (DHS). DHS was ostensibly formed to collectivize agencies possessing national security and emergency response capacities and duties to “secure the homeland,” and improve coordination and efficiency of responses to national emergencies. Has it worked? Not according to a recent poll that declared DHS to be the least trusted agency within the U.S. government by the American people. Interestingly, public trust in the FBI, CIA, and NSA, despite media excoriations of FBI terrorist investigations, the CIA’s failure to locate and kill Bin Laden, and the alleged threat to privacy posed by the NSA domestic surveillance program, is higher than trust in DHS. Why the lack of confidence in DHS? The Department’s size, with 20+ agencies and 170,000+ employees, may influence skeptics to conclude it will never integrate fully or that some components have no direct role in securing the homeland, such as FEMA. Yet it seems clear that the more significant reason may be that Americans are wary of any new government department or agency (DHS was created in 2002) and are more apt to place their trust in agencies that have track records, even records rife with mistakes, to no track record at all. How long would it take for a new domestic intelligence agency to become operational and engender public trust? How many attacks will occur during such a fundamental reorganization?

Therein lays one of the significant arguments against the formation of a new American MI5 intelligence agency to take over the FBI’s domestic counterterrorism functions: Where will this new agency obtain its analysts and field operatives? What will be new about it other than its name and reporting structure? The learning curve in these fields is too long and the War on Terror too pressing to afford sufficient time for an entirely new agency to select inexperienced personnel and train them according to the new agencies techniques and standards. If such an agency were created, there would be an immediate need for experienced intelligence analysis staff, and the applicant pool would consist of the same analysts currently functioning within the FBI, CIA, and DHS. Through no fault of their own, these intelligence staffers would bring established organizational cultures, information sharing issues, and varying work ethics, thereby ensuring that the “new” agency would be anything but new in its ideas or preconceived intelligence estimates.

What the WSJ editors and others who have called for the creation of a new intelligence agency neglect to recommend is the need to give equal scrutiny to the possibility of restructuring the FBI by reassigning jurisdiction over many financial crimes to other federal agencies that are currently smaller and limited in scope, such as the Treasury Department, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF), and others. Thousands of FBI agents currently investigating white collar crimes could be freed from those cases and assigned to higher priority investigations, specifically domestic counterterrorism. If it is true, as a Washington Post contributor argued in 2005, that the FBI is 90% criminal investigation and 10% intelligence, then it would make more sense to move those percentages closer together and not lose whatever level of expertise exists in that 10%, than it would to simply take the 10% away and create yet another government agency. If after such a restructuring and narrowing of focus the FBI continued to prove inadequate to the task of counterterrorism, then a proposal to reassign such duties to a different or new agency should be considered.

Under reporting the number of National Security Letters it issued and inadequately training agents on what information could or could not be requested with the letters were clearly internal administrative errors. The Inspector General’s report declared that such errors were not criminal in nature and there was no evidence that any privacy rights were violated by the FBI’s issuance of the letters or the subsequent under reporting of the number issued. Yet critics are always poised to call for the most drastic remedies, and often use the symptoms of minor illnesses like under reporting to suggest the patient, in this case the FBI, has no hope for recovery. If occasional error or failure to connect the intelligence dots were considered symptoms of terminal illness in an agency, no intelligence or investigative agency, foreign or domestic, would have hope for survival, as all appear similarly afflicted.

The WSJ editors, though, did make an important statement regarding any proposed remedy to the FBI’s shortcomings:

The worst outcome would be if Congress limited the administrative subpoena power in order to punish the FBI. By all accounts, these "national security letters" have proven to be useful in tracking potential terror threats. In particular, the Bush Administration shouldn't now give in to any such demands merely to appease Congress or save the jobs of Messrs. Mueller or Gonzales.

Spy the News! concurs with this opinion and advises readers to watch the development of these issues, as Bush administration critics will seize upon National Security Letters as an alleged menace to personal and corporate privacy rights. The National Security Letters work, and despite media stories with alarmist headlines insinuating that the FBI was “snooping” on Americans and intentionally not reporting it, the only remedy that is needed in this case is an organized reporting system that tracks the number of letters issued and assures that agents are properly trained in what information they can and cannot obtain with this valuable tool in the War on Terror.