LAST WEEK was not a good one for national security.
First Michael Chertoff, secretary of Homeland Security announced his “gut feeling” that the nation is at a heightened risk of terrorist attack this summer. He said the feeling was not based on any specific intelligence, just a feeling.
Then an intelligence report was released indicating that, while U.S. troops have been busy elsewhere, al-Qaida has managed to rebuild its operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan to pre-9/11 levels.
Then Chertoff said he did not believe that al-Qaida was that strong, although it had gained strength.
Why does the man in charge of protecting the nation from terrorist attack find himself relying on gut feelings rather than hard intelligence? Why does he discount hard intelligence when it is offered?
The root of the problem may be in another report released last week.
The majority staff of the House Committee on Homeland Security compiled a study reporting that many leadership jobs in Chertoff’s department have not been filled. Twenty-four percent of the department’s 575 executive positions are empty. That’s an average — the percentage is worse in some key offices.
According to Info Week, as of May 1, the “Assistant Secretary for Intelligence has 36 percent of its positions vacant. Another 34 percent of the top positions in the Office of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services are empty, as are 31 percent of the posts in the Federal Emergency Management Agency.”
Perhaps Chertoff has no intelligence he can trust because his intelligence office lacks the staff to do its job properly. That is not good for the nation. “Gut feelings” may work for just fine for Jack Bauer on “24,” but they are not enough to base a national security policy on in the real world.
If Chertoff’s gut were truly sensitive to looming trouble, he might have seen this coming last week:
WASHINGTON (AP) — Congressional investigators set up a bogus company with only a postal box and within a month obtained a license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that allowed them to buy enough radioactive material for a small “dirty bomb.”...
Nobody at the NRC checked whether the company was legitimate and an agency official even helped the investigators fill out the application form, Sen. Norm Coleman said in an interview Wednesday.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission acknowledged that more checking is needed in such licensing and said that since being told of the General Accounting Office sting operation it has tightened licensing procedures.
Why, in a time of increasing fears that terrorists might detonate a dirty bomb in an American city, doesn’t Homeland Security or one of its investigative arms have a role in monitoring the transfer of nuclear material within the country?
The American people may be getting a gut feeling of their own — a feeling that Homeland Security, for all its power, remains a weak link in the national security system.