Failing to Connect the Dots

Between the failures of the "intelligence community" (is that an oxymoron ?) and Obama's failure to take the war on terror seriously (at least until it damages his re-electibility) by denying our military; intelligence apparatus; and detention/interrogation/prosecution apparatus the proper tools and approach, is it no wonder that we have had, and will likely to continue to have, major failures.

Consider recent events:

Fort Hood massacre by army Jihadist
Underwear bomber
Suicide bomber double agent in Afghanistan
Closing of American Embassy in Yemen due to threats

These are all in the last month or so ... and these are only ones that we know about.


'Our intelligence community failed to connect the dots.' [Andy McCarthy]

As Cliff observes, the president's statement is a serious indictment of our intelligence community.

But is the solution, then, to deny them the dots in the first place by sending Abdul Mutallab to the civilian justice system, giving him a lawyer so that interrogation must cease, and setting up a situation where we incent him to hold back on telling us the most valuable information until we plea bargain and make other concessions in his criminal case?

Over the weekend, John Brennan, the president's counterterrorism adviser, contended on Fox News Sunday that that is a perfectly sensible way to do counterterrorism. (See Jen Rubin's post at Contentions.) If that's what he really thinks, we've got a lot bigger problem with the intelligence community than just its inability to connect dots. It doesn't want to know the dots.
And why should we think it would be otherwise? Attorney General Holder told the Senate Intelligence Committee that we wouldn't need to interrogate bin Laden if the al-Qaeda chief were captured because, after all, we already have an overwhelming criminal case against him. According to Brennan, "the Department of Justice makes these determinations about what's the best tool [military detention or civilian due process] to use." If Holder thinks we'd have no reasons other than strengthening the criminal case to interrogate the head of the terror network we're fighting a war against, and Holder is the guy in charge of deciding when we need to interrogate combatants, isn't that, like, a problem?

In any event, is it just the intelligence community that won't see, much less connect, the dots? When Obama first spoke about Abdul Mutallab, he tried to suggest the terrorist was a lone wolf — and that was after Abdul Mutallab told us he was sent by al-Qaeda in Yemen and after, according to Robert Gibbs today, we knew that Abdul Mutallab had "actionable intelligence" to provide.

Our intelligence agencies performed horribly here, and their statements since the news broke do not inspire confidence about their handle on the zillion threats we haven't heard about. But is Obama in any position to complain about that? He's spent the last year allowing intelligence officers to be investigated criminally, portraying them as rogues, accusing them of war crimes, removing them from the interrogation equation, and rebuffing calls to disclose to the public how effective their post-9/11 intelligence gathering was. If you create a climate in which pursuing and connecting dots is likely to get you in a heap of hurt, how surprised should you be that we've become lax in dot pursuit and connection?

If the president really wants dots connected, why doesn't he just declare Abdul Mutallab an unlawful enemy combatant and interrogate him like one? Doing so wouldn't stop Obama from having the terrorist indicted in the civilian justice system some time down the road. But if Abdul Mutallab has actionable intelligence, what's stopping the commander-in-chief from taking the obvious steps to get it? And why is the attorney general, rather than, say, the president or the secretary of defense, making these wartime decisions?