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Spencer Ackerman uncovers a dynamic that would seem to be at the heart of the bureaucratic difficulties in putting together all the discrete pieces of information that various agencies had gathered on alleged underwear bomber Umar Abdulmutallab. Namely that the National Counterterrorism Center, which is tasked with putting all the disparate pieces of intelligence collected by other government agencies, only has about "eight or nine" analysts working in their Middle East Branch at any given time:
According to NCTC veterans, the NCTC’s Middle East Branch consists of eight to nine analysts at any given time. Those analysts are responsible for integrating and analyzing millions of pieces of fragmentary data relevant to terrorism in the Middle East provided by partner intelligence agencies like the CIA and the National Security Agency. They disseminate their synthesis throughout the intelligence community and into the law-enforcement and policymaking worlds, to ensure officials perceive previously hidden connections that might reveal the next al-Qaeda plot and act accordingly. And they’re responsible for analysis of a region central to the organization: Saudi Arabia, birthplace of Osama bin Laden and ancestral home of most 9/11 hijackers; Iraq, rocked by years of war and occupation; the restive Levant, Israel and the Palestinian territories, a decades-long hotbed of extremism; and Yemen, where the Nigeria-born Abdulmutallab received his explosive device from a growing al-Qaeda presence.The silver lining of the failed bombing incident is that it's forcing the administration to take a hard look at the post-9/11 national security bureaucracy. But as David Brooks pointed out artfully last week, no system is going to work 100 percent of the time, and the fact that this is the one the U.S. has been relying on for years sort of underscores Rush Holt's point that a focus on "war fronts" obscures the rather undramatic, painstaking work of analyzing intelligence information.
At the same time, I think we need to consider that part of the problem is the sheer volume of information being gathered almost indiscriminately, making it difficult to divine real threats from false ones.
-- A. Serwer
