The Homeland Hack

Just a quickie about one estimate of the costs of implementing the overhaul of driver licensing mandated by the Real ID Act -- there'll be more on this as state governments come to grips with what they fear will be a huge unfunded mandate.

This is my latest look at the vastly expanded use of terrorism watch-lists and its consequences. This piece examines the plight of a young man named in a California terrorism case, where a young American of Pakistani origin was convicted of attending a terrorist training camp. The man, Hamid Hayat, named several other young men from the small agricultural community of Lodi as having attended similar camps. One of them, Jaber Ismail, is currently in Pakistan with his father, and has been told that they are both on a federal "no-fly" list and will not be allowed to return home unless Jaber undergoes a polygraph test.
Hayat was convicted solely on the basis of his own confession. Something about this case smells fishy to me and I'll be writing more about it in the future.

Headline says it all. Short story is here. Hat-tip (as we say here in the blogo-sphere) to Steven Aftergood.

The National Security Agency has launched a major research initiative in information sharing.
I wrote a two-part report on the plan. The first part examines the challenges the project faces developing technology in a complex and evolving policy environment.
The second part looks at the role of the office of the new director of national intelligence in promoting this and other information-sharing initiatives and at the unhappy track record of such initiatives, many of which have stalled or been abandoned.

Headline says it all. Story is here.

My write up of the very quiet announcement from the Department of Homeland Security this week that they are gutting their plan for a national biometric ID card for transportation workers. The department said Monday that port facility and merchant vessel owners and operators will not be required to install readers for the cards.

This my initial (and very short) story on the research deal the National Security Agency inked last week with a small software company to help protect sensitive data intelligence agencies are sharing with first responders.

A little exclusive on the new director of public affairs in the office of the director of national intelligence.

This is my piece about the alleged efforts by supporters of the Tamil Tigers to buy weapons in New York. Counter-terrorism specialists told me that represented an alarming departure from their traditional activities, which had been restricted to fundraising and politics. They worried it might be a harbinger of a strategic shift for the LTTE and a more operational stance for its networks here.

The privacy and civil liberties office of the U.S. director of national intelligence is considering proposals to exempt counter-terrorism information from some of the restrictions the Privacy Act places on the government. Civil Liberties Protection Officer Alexander Joel told United Press International his office was working on recommendations to President Bush about the rules for the new Information-Sharing Environment mandated by Congress as part of its massive intelligence reform in 2004. "Our thinking is that we would recommend the establishment of a governance structure for privacy in the Information-Sharing Environment," he said, suggesting that at least some of the substantive decisions on the issue might be punted until such a structure was established.

Donna Bucella joins the rush for the doors at the FBI -- and her former colleague Chris Swecker at Bank of America.

A news piece the day of the judgment, and then a follow up the next day looking at the implications for the efforts by sen. Arlen Specter, R-Penn., and others to legislate the program.

This is my second story about the Iraq NIE, which will be the focus of such public interest that some senators have called for an unclassified summary to be issued. This year's election is widely predicted to be, in part, the rendering of the voters' own verdict on the questions the document will answer, and as a result, there is going to be enormous osmotic pressure. There will be leaks.

This is my piece on the forthcoming National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, which is so controversial, Director National Intelligence John Negroponte himself is thought likely to sign off on the terms of reference.

FEMA's David Paulison and the National Hurricane Center's Max Mayfield will be at NOAA's unveiling of its latest hurricane predictions.

New counter-intelligence chief
The Director National of Intelligence has appointed a replacement for Michelle Van Cleave as the national counter-intelligence executive. He is Joel F. Brenner, formerly the inspector general for the National Security Agency.
Bill Gertz over at the Washington Times wrote about this vacancy and about contenders for the post.
Your humble correspondent hopes to make some calls about this appointment shortly.

Immigration reform and border security
Frank Davis is the latest to take the temperature of the immigration reform bill and pronounce it dead.
As your humble correspondent explained last week, he refrains from making public pronouncements of this kind about legislation, because of his (at the time) private and (now) clearly mistaken conviction during the fall of 2004 that the intelligence reform bill was similarly doomed.
The National Journal has a typically comprehensive look (subscription only, alas) at the chances for progress, including a useful historical recap of all the times triggers have and haven't worked as legislative peace formulas.
It is election season, and that means, as the Natty Jo piece suggests, a lot of people on Capitol Hill are wondering whether you get more votes by passing some kind of compromise immigration reform package, or by hanging tough and using the issue to bash the Democrats.
The problem is, that's not the way the institutional structures make the political calculation work.
Let's again employ the hypothetical point of view of a horrid cynic who had somehow wormed his way into the White House. To pass legislation through the Senate before the election, you basically have to make it a potential hostage to Democrat guerilla tactics -- and your point men are Judiciary Committee Chairman Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Penn., and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn. Hmmmmm.
The intelligence reform bill couldn't pass before the election in 2004 because neither side wanted to give the other the chance to make it, or even just claim it as, a win.
In the end, intelligence reform turned out to be a marginal issue in the election, but it was something the White House wanted to happen, and when the president returned from the campaign, flush with electoral victory, there was a great sense of momentum, of needing to get through the final lap.
Immigration reform is likely to be a major issue in this campaign and the political calculation about it is bound to change even before the election as everyone pores over their polling data. As to what might happen after the election -- that is basically anyone's guess at this stage.
You humble correspondent remembers always the caution of the great Yogi Berra. "It is dangerous to make predictions, especially about the future."

Bubbling under
My friend and former colleague, Eli Lake reports for the New York Sun that the Iraqi government is holding a group of army officers it suspects of having been involved with a coup plot last month.
There have been a lot of stories about this alleged plot circulating, but Eli's seems to be the first one to raise -- albeit implicitly -- the question of who these alleged plotters are and in whose custody they might be and what is being done to them.
If they were indeed arrested, as Eli reports, with the help of U.S. forces, the United States might be said to have a moral, if not legal, responsibility for their well-being.

Lies, damn lies and wage statistics
Now here's a thing the Homeland Hack was shocked to learn.
Average compensation for federal employees is double that of private sector workers.
In 2005, the average pay of a full-time U.S. government employee was $106,579, including benefits. The much larger number of workers employed by the private sector averaged $53,289 each with benefits included, according to Govexec.com.
Labor unions say that's because government outsourcing tends to reduce the number of blue collar workers -- security guards, janitors, junior administrative staff -- who are directly on the federal payroll, leaving the more highly qualified and compensated professionals like lawyers and accountants to raise the average.
I think the persistence of low-wage, no-benefit jobs in the private sector has something to do with it, too. Interestingly, the federal advantage is much lower if you don't count benefits, because then the private sector figure is less weighed down by its long tail of no benefit jobs at the bottom.

Lauren Verdery, the head of public affairs at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, is to step down, United Press International has learned. Here's my brief for the UPI wire.

Al-Qaida's Egyptian merger -- all talk and no jihadis?
There's continuing uncertainty about what the Ayman al-Zawahiri videotape released over the weekend actually means.
The tape, released by al-Qaida's media arm, al-Sahab, and available here to SITE Institute subscribers is, according to their translation, an interview with Mohammed Khalil al-Hakayma, AKA Abu Jihad al-Misri, with an introduction by Zawahiri.
Al-Misri says in the interview that a group of hardliners from the al-Jamaa al-Islamiya group in Egypt had joined al-Qaida, "to help our great scholar, His Eminence the unshakeable Sheikh Omar Abd al-Rahman, languishing in the dungeons of the American prisons, and to repel the attacking enemy which is occupying the countries of the Muslims."
Rahman, known as the blind sheikh, has been in U.S. federal prison since his 1995 conviction in a conspiracy to blow up New York City landmarks.
Al-Misri says the foremost mujahed from the Egyptian group merging with al-Qaida is Mohammed al-Islambouli, and Zawahiri's introduction promises a message from him soon.
According to al-Jazeera, Islambouli is the younger brother of Khalid al-Islambouli, who was executed for his part in the 1979 assassination of Anwar al-Sadat, the then Egyptian president. The younger Islambouli left Egypt in the mid-1980s and is believed to have been in Afghanistan working with al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.
But now, it seems, al-Jamaa al-Islamiya -- whose leaders declared from jail in 1998 that they had abandoned armed struggle -- have posted a message on their Web site (Arabic only, alas) denying any link with al-Qaida.
According to this CNN piece, the message stresses that the Zawahiri statement "is not true, and… contradicts reality." The group "absolutely rejects the claims in (their) entirety," CNN reports.
One translation of the full message sent to your humble correspondent by an anonymous donor specifically denies that Rahman is with the breakaway group. "It is well known (he) was and still is one of the staunchest supporters" of the decision to abandon armed jihad, says the message.
One of the other militants named in the original al-Sahab tape, Sheikh Abedel-Akhar Hamad, has already given an interview to al-Jazeera TV denying that he is joining al-Qaida, the message says.
The bottom line question is: How much of a presence does the breakaway faction have on the ground in Egypt? And that still seems unclear.
Sheikh Abdel Akher Hammad, a former al-Jamaa al-Islamiya leader, told Aljazeera from Germany that support for the merger was limited. "If (some) brothers... have joined, then this is their personal view and I don't think that most… members share that same opinion."

FAMS latest -- Knowlton speaks out
One other piece worthy of note: the Las Vegas Review-Journal has tracked down David Knowlton, the special agent who was in charge of the Federal Air Marshal Service field office there, and who is said to have imposed a controversial quota on marshals' reporting of suspicious incidents.
The piece is pretty detailed and it gives Knowlton a lot of room to defend himself.
Bottom line? After being advised there was an "interpretation issue," Knowlton told the paper, "I made it very clear: There's no quotas, but I do expect participation" in the program of "intelligence gathering" by marshals keeping alert for suspicious activity of all kinds, and reporting back to a database at headquarters via special two-way pager-type devices.
The problem is, as several have told your humble correspondent, some marshals basically refused to participate in the program having decided it was, in the words of one them, "bullshit."
"It was just a quota by another name," said the marshal about the insistence on participation. And more than a year after the service's headquarters says the quota issue was resolved, a whistleblower complaint filed with the U.S. Office of Special Counsel alleged that a minimum number of Surveillance Detection Reports was still expected every month.
The Review-Journal says Knowlton was "disappointed by the air marshals who have taken their concerns to the news media. He said the negative publicity overshadows the good work done every day by thousands of air marshals throughout the country."
There are clearly some tough questions to be asked about why so many air marshals -- and so many from Las Vegas specifically -- have, generally after exhausting internal channels, felt so strongly about the issues they were raising that they went to outside agencies like the Office of Special Counsel or the media.
The piece quotes Knowlton as sourcing it back to the quota issue. "It all started with the Surveillance Detection Reports," he said. "I've tried to fix it, and that was two years ago."

And finally...
...something that religious extremists of every stripe can agree on. They are all -- Christian, Jewish and Islamic -- unshakably opposed to a huge international gay pride event in Jerusalem this week.
"In these times of intolerance and suspicion," write the organizers of WorldPride, "from the home of three of the world's great religions, we will proclaim that love knows no borders." To which your humble correspondent can only add, Amen.

Once again, developments on the Middle East crisis, starting with Monday's 10 AM statement to the press by President Bush at his Crawford ranch about the proposed U.N. resolution, are likely to overshadow the homeland security agenda this week.

Oliver Stone's movie about Sept. 11, "World Trade Center," is released Thursday. Ten percent of the gross take from the first five days of theatrical release will be donated to four New York-based charities that are working in different ways to memorialize the victims of the attack or provide ongoing support to their families.
Several organizations (including this one and this one) have already indicated that they will use the movie to try and promote conspiracy theories about the attacks.
All-in-all, there's likely to be quite a bit of Sept. 11 revisionism around this week, as the chairs of the blue-ribbon commission that investigated the attacks, Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, are also due to publish their account of the commission's behind-the-scenes-struggles with the administration and congress. In advance of the book, there's already been one new revelation -- that the commission considered a criminal referral over the way they were decieved by NORAD and the Department of Defense.
The extent of that deception is thrown into sharp relief for your humble correspondent by the audio tapes published on the Vanity Fair Web site by a producer of the last Sept. 11 movie, Flight 93.
Now Kean tells the Washington Post that the commission was never able to ascertain why NORAD had tried to hide the real sequence of events. The Jersey Girls say that this admission "puts into question the veracity of the entire Commission’s report."
I think that's a stretch, personally, but I do think it shows there's a danger that in hyping the importance of the book, coverage of it could end up leaving question marks over Kean and Hamilton's earlier work -- the commission's own report.

What action there is on the homeland security front is likely to center around the stalled congressional debate on border security and immigration reform. The House Committee on Homeland Security holds a field hearing in Washington State on Tuesday -- one of the 19 that House GOP leaders are staging around the country to highlight their opposition to the Senate-passed bill.
The hearing will focus on the security of the northern border, and will be previewed in a Monday afternoon conference call with reporters.
The real policy question here is what will happen to the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative, or WHTI, a congressionally-mandated requirement that U.S. citizens and others show a passport or other secure identity document that establishes nationality in order to enter the United States.
The Senate version of the Fiscal 2007 Homeland Security Appropriations Act contains language that would postpone the introduction of the WHTI requirement 17 months, until June 2009. But last week, Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, and chairman of the powerful Senate Finance Committee, came out opposing any postponement.
There's bound to be a lot of back-room chatter, and loads of sound and fury about this. But there's not likely to be a decision until the appropriations conference meets after the recess.
Very little else worthy of note this week. The Nixon Center is holding a briefing on Tuesday looking at the connections between Hezbollah and Iran and Syria. Israeli military official Michael Herzog, plus scholars from GW University and the International Crisis Group will speak.

Finally, top marks to the American Bar Association for trying to make their annual meeting in Hawaii as accessible to DC-based reporters as possible. Obviously, the hack would have preferred a complimentary press plane (plus five-star accommodation), but failing that a Web site with streaming video and downloadable audio isn't a bad alternative.

The Senate is set to call for a new National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, setting the stage for a new, and likely gloomy, U.S. assessment of the prospects there.
Legislative language, authored by Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., which is to become part of the Senate version of the must-pass defense appropriation bill, calls for the estimate to be issued within 90 days, according to a statement from Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., the chairman of the powerful intelligence committee.
As Ken Silverstein (don't we all want to be Ken when we grow up? I know I do) revealed last month, the fact that there hasn't been an NIE on Iraq is frustrating some in the CIA. He also reported last week that six democratic senators had written to the the Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte, asking for an updated NIE.
Now it looks like there might be one. About time, too.

Another piece of Senate intel news. The committee has approved two of the five sections of its long-awaited Phase Two report on pre-war intelligence on Iraq. Won't be declassified until September at the earliest though. More on this tomorrow.

This is my story today on the possible threat to the United States posed by Hezbollah. As I note in the second paragraph: current U.S. intelligence assessments "indicate the group's strategic posture up till now appears designed to avoid direct confrontation with the United States."The concern is, what would happen if that strategic posture changes?U.S intelligence officials believe they have a pretty good handle on Hezbollah's strategic intentions, but they remain focused on what capacities the group might have in place to use in an attack in the United States if those intentions change.This is where the focus turns to the border. On a number of occasions, U.S. officials have publicly quoted intelligence reports to the effect that Jihadi groups believed being smuggled in across the border offered advantages from an operational security perspective, because U.S. authorities would not then know of their presence in the country.The case they tend to cite in support of this thesis is that of Mahmoud Youseff Kourani, a Hezbollah supporter who was smuggled across the U.S.-Mexico border in the trunk of a car in February 2001.The fact is Hezbollah has a world-wide network of supporters, including in the United States. Generally speaking, U.S. intelligence sees the Hezbollah presence here as being logistical (fund-raising and some procurement), rather than operational.Bu the Madrid transit attacks last year, carried out by a group of al-Qaida supporters -- some known to the authorities, but believed to be logistics guys -- have changed the equation. Now everyone linked to Hezbollah is seen as a potential operational threat.Nonetheless, the organization is disciplined and -- as I said -- currently appears committed to avoiding a direct clash with the United States.Which is why the feds regard a lone-wolf attack as being as great a danger.

AFP has a story out of Kabul today which is one of those that makes your humble correspondent wonder whether the whole world has gone completely insane.
One thousand South Korean christians, ignoring the advice of... well, everyone really... have flown to Kabul, apparently to stage a Christian peace rally entitled "Rejoice! Afghanistan."

UPDATE Weds AM: Former UPI colleague Eli Lake (now of the N.Y. Sun) has a piece today about ongoing Israeli efforts to disrupt al-Manar, the Lebanese TV channel affiliated with Hezbollah (Link doesn't seem to be working ATOW). I linked yesterday to an interview with al-Manar boss Abdullah Qasir carried by Asharq al-Awsat.
Lake's piece notes that "Psy-ops are increasingly a critical part of how advanced countries fight asymmetrical war," adding that part of the Israeli campaign is designed to "sanction" (errrm, that might be a synonym for "bomb") the Lebanese people "to the point where they understand the terrible price that the country will pay for allowing Hezbollah to work in its midst."
While U.S. operations aim at "winning hearts and minds," writes Lake, "the Israelis for now are content with terrifying the friends of their enemy. 'Part of this is to instill fear,'" he quotes a former senior Israel Defense Force official as saying.

I'm still leading with my story about concern on Capitol Hill over the way Congress oversees the activities of the nation's highly secretive intelligence agencies. My story focuses on the House, because I think the bill being pushed by Reps. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., and Adam Schiff, D-Calif., is a straw in a gathering wind. But there's also some feeling among veterans of the intelligence committee in the other chamber that the oversight process is just not working there either.
The views of Charles Battaglia, John Moseman and L. Britt Snider at this forum the Center for American Progress organized last month got too little attention at the time. They are well worth a read. Moseman's comments (page 13) on the importance of leadership are particularly worthy of note.

There are two Senate hearings likely to be interesting this morning -- both at the same time, of course.
At the Senate Finance Committee, Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, plans to "rake (U.S. Customs and Border Protection) over the coals," as one observer put it to me, about weaknesses in their safeguards against forged documents.
Over at Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, Stuart Bowen, the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction will present his "lessons learned" report on contracting and procurement.
Bowen is a master of, erm, understatement. His bottom line? "The contracting and procurement effort in Iraq substantially improved over the course of the Iraq relief and reconstruction program," he writes. Hmmm. That is probably one way of looking at it.
It is not now widely remembered that Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., once championed the idea of putting this gentleman in charge of overseeing the spending of Katrina relief funds.

I finally got around to reading Sheryl Gay Stolberg's piece about the Bush/FEMA/Paulison event down in Miami Monday, and she made a very shrewd observation -- the president said nothing about hurricane preparedness. Nothing. Nada. Zip.
Looked at from the point of view of a horrid cynic who had somehow wormed his way into the White House public affairs shop, this is a twofer. They get pictures of the president at the National Hurricane Center -- which will look soooo much better than those ones of him mucking around with musicians did last year, if there's a big storm. But -- at the same time -- if there is a big storm, and the response is still… imperfect, you have given no hostages to fortune. There will be no promises to come back to haunt you.
Ker-ching. You have to admire the way these (hypothetical) people operate.

Filed my take on the rumbles I'm hearing on the Hill about intelligence oversight.

Bubbling under...
The London-based pan-Arab daily newspaper, Asharq al-Awsat, has an interview with Abdullah Qasir, the director of al-Manar TV; the channel affiliated with Hezbollah and designated a terrorist entity by the U.S. Treasury in March.
Qasir says the station has gone underground, but continued to broadcast, despite ongoing targeting of its facilities by the Israeli military -- what analyst Bill Arkin has called "a continuing game of cat and mouse to keep it off the air."
Qasir says the station had contingency plans, because it expected to be targeted "From the moment we were classified by the Americans as a terrorist organization."
"We also expected this when we felt that the Israelis have set up more than one lobby whose main task is to hound al-Manar by filing complaints with European courts," Qasir went on. "We felt that we are targeted and that a day might come when we are targeted on the security and military levels."

UPDATE Weds AM: Seems the European Union has decided again not to list Hezbollah as a terror group.

An interesting item that came across the AKI transom says some al-Qaida militants in Saudi Arabia appear at odds with the call from the group's number two, Ayman al-Zawahiri, to support Hezbollah in its conflict with Israel.
But the piece doesn't quote them as directly rejecting Zawahiri's position, and I don't know enough about the Jihadi magazine that's cited, or the Saudi scene generally, to know whether it's important or not. If I get the chance today, I might ask around.

Congress Daily has a pretty comprehensive piece on the chemical security bill the House Homeland Security Committee passed last week; no word yet from the House Energy and Commerce Committee, where the bill must go next, or from the Senate.

The drumbeat on interior enforcement faltered slightly in Chicago after an immigration judge granted a one-year stay of deportation to 11 undocumented workers, the Chicago Tribune reports. The Trib says that the judge acted to give the men time to apply for amnesty, sorry I mean earned legalization, if the Congress acted on a reform package after the November elections.

And finally, on a personnel note, Michael Bopp has left his job as majority staff director and chief counsel for the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, to go work for the OMB. According to the Bangor Daily News over the weekend, "Bopp said that outside of the Washington area, the role of the OMB in shaping federal policies is little understood."
No kidding. It's like this huge secret shadow government that no one in America knows exists. I mean everyone's heard of the White House, and the Congress, and the Pentagon and most people could probably name at least a couple more government departments and make a vaguely accurate stab at telling you what they did, but OMB?

Time for your humble correspondent to go get *less* coffee.