Rivalries, staffing problems threaten U.S. intelligence agencies

[cal04]

A year after a sweeping government reorganization began, the agencies charged with protecting the United States against terrorist attacks remain troubled by high-level turnover, overlapping responsibilities and bureaucratic rivalry, according to former and current officials, the New York Times reports in Tuesday editions, RAW STORY has learned. Excerpts:

Progress has been made, most of the officials say, toward one critical goal: the sharing of terrorist threat information from all agencies at the National Counterterrorism Center. But many argue that the biggest restructuring of spy agencies in half a century has bloated the bureaucracy, adding boxes to the government organization chart without producing clearly defined roles. John O. Brennan, who served as the interim director of the center until July, said the Bush administration is "still struggling" with the redesign.

"I still don't see an overarching framework that assigns roles and responsibilities to each agency in counterterrorism," said Brennan, who spent 23 years at the CIA. He was replaced as head of the National Counterterrorism Center by John Scott Redd, a retired vice admiral selected by President Bush in June.

His concerns are widely echoed in Washington, where John D. Negroponte is approaching the end of his first year as the first director of national intelligence, a job created by Congress in response to the Sept. 11 attacks. Negroponte is scheduled to testify about threats to national security before the Senate Committee on Armed Services on Tuesday.

In the background of the skirmish among agencies new and old is a more fundamental conflict. Like other government veterans, Brennan said he did not believe that Negroponte had moved decisively enough to limit attempts by the Pentagon, which controls 80 percent of the intelligence budget, to expand its role in spying.

DEVELOPING....

http://rawstory.com/news/2006/Rivalries_staffing_problems_threaten_U.S._intelligence_0227.html

[MadMaddie]

1. Ah more steller planning from the * cabal...

This country is in deep shit.....These agencies had a fragile territorial relationship with each other in the first place...if they couldn't decipher the data before and analyze it in a timely manner to prevent another disaster....you know their computer systems still do not overlap to allow efficient communications...

God Help this country!!

[lyonn]

2. Makes you think that all that data mining without warrants

is meaningless or a smoke screen. Guess bush thinks all this secret stuff he can't tell us about will cause people to believe they actually have an intelligence agency that works. bush only wishes he could tell us how many attacks he has stopped due to all this secret stuff, but, then he'd have to kill us. (poor shot at sarcasm)

[MadMaddie]

3. They don't have enough manpower...

to slog through all of the data they have compiled so far.....like a needle in a haystack......

[upi402]

4. i'd hate to be a loyal american inside the company about now

gotta be rough on the internals.