Trouble at the NCTC

Spencer Ackerman reports on concerns that the National Counterterrorism Center doesn’t do much valuable work:

According to interviews with several veteran NCTC analysts, the five-year-old center, meant to be a hub for pulling together terrorism information from across the 16-agency U.S. intelligence community to better anticipate future attacks, has a cumbersome bureaucratic structure and a questionable set of institutional values. Only half of NCTC’s roughly 300 analysts focus directly on al-Qaeda — with some analyzing terror groups that do not threaten the United States, like the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka or the Hamas radicals of the Gaza Strip. Analysts are valued by the volume of writing they produce for policymakers, not the impact that analysis has on counterterrorism operations. Analysts entering NCTC from the partner agencies are assigned to areas where NCTC has vacancies, regardless of their particular specialties. And the managers who preside over analysts seeking to connect the dots — as Obama chastised the intelligence community for falling short on the Christmas would-be attack — are often inexperienced in intelligence analysis themselves.

“What counts over all in terms of promotion, recognition, etc., is the number of papers published,” one NCTC veteran said about the center’s standards for success. “It’s a numbers game.” Another added, “Publishing is the goal, not the effect of your paper.” All NCTC veterans interviewed for this piece spoke only on condition of anonymity due to their ongoing involvement in the intelligence community. Their goal in speaking out, they said, is to strengthen U.S. counterterrorism efforts by shining a light on aspects of the center’s apparent malaise.

Bad.

That said, my inclination is to go soft on the intelligence community and its role in counterterrorism. What counterterrorism discourse most needs in the United States is a double dose of realism. On the one hand realism about the fact that a small number of al-Qaeda operatives, working with a small quantity of funds and no advanced weapons, can’t seriously harm the United States. And on the other hand realism about the fact that counterterrorism officials can’t provide 100 percent security.

It’s obviously worth doing the best job we can to prevent terrorist attacks. But the really important thing isn’t to try to ensure that we’re never victimized by a low-capability attack, but to try to ensure that terrorists can’t achieve any drastic increases in their capabilities. What happened on 9/11, essentially, was that people hadn’t previously given enough consideration to the possibility that you could leverage a civilian jetliner in a way that makes it possible to destroy a skyscraper while armed with nothing but knives. The greatest thing we’ve done for our security since then is simply that people are now aware of this fact and nobody is ever going to let terrorists take control of an airplane believing that they’ll merely be held for ransom and then released. The scare-story people have been telling about al-Qaeda ever since that time has had to do with nuclear weapons—Condi Rice’s smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud—but you address nuclear proliferation by addressing nuclear proliferation, not by getting better at hunting down individual terrorists.