FBI-CIA turf wars leave U.S. dangerously unprotected

Matthew Engel, Guardian News Service, Washington

In New York, on the morning of Sept. 12, I met an exiled Ulsterman. He was homeless, wandering the streets with his wife and baby, because their apartment block, like the rest of lower Manhattan, had been sealed off.

Having grown up in Belfast, he knew all about living with terrorism. The family had been at home in their high-rise when disaster struck, and he described graphically how he heard the noise and then saw the crowds rushing away from the World Trade Center. His first instinct, however, was not to take much notice: "I just thought it was the Americans being ridiculous again."

Americans are -- famously -- the least phlegmatic of people. If there's trouble in the Balkans, they stop visiting the Tower of London because Europe is dangerous. The whole history of the U.S., indeed, is punctuated with scares, crazes and occasional mass hysteria. But over the past week, a new fatalism has set in. It is rather attractive.

This morning the nation is due back at work after the Memorial Day holiday, which is supposed to honor the glorious fallen but, in practice, celebrates the start of summer. People went off for the weekend with the warnings of their government ringing in their ears.

There was something new every day last week: A generalized alarm from vice-president Cheney on Sunday, which morphed into a threat from suicide bombers on Monday, and weapons of mass destruction on Tuesday, a planned attack on New York landmarks on Wednesday, an assault on subway systems on Thursday and raids by small planes or divers on Friday. (In the immortal words of Cpl. Jones from the 1970s BBC TV comedy show, Dad's Army: "Don't panic! Don't panic!") Then the warners pushed off for the weekend, like everyone else.

Throughout this time the official level of alert never wavered from amber, the third level out of five behind orange and red. Many of the warnings were apparently based on information from Abu Zubaydah, the al-Qaeda leader captured in March, who may not be absolutely up to the minute with his old chums' thinking. Leaks, however, suggest he has so far told his interrogators they are planning to attack pretty much every possible target between Maine and the Marshall Islands, so he will presumably be proved right eventually. The U.S. is indeed vulnerable to a new terrorist attack, not least because of the manifest incompetence of those responsible for guarding against it.

No sensible journalist discounts warnings of possible disaster. One of the laws of our trade states that if you predict an imminent war between (say) Albania and New Zealand, it will get on page one. If it then fails to materialize, you can either finesse it (Back from the Brink!) or forget it. Everyone will just be relieved. If, however, you write such a war is impossible, this non-news gets buried unless the war takes place -- in which case your reputation gets buried the moment the first Albanian bomb drops on Rotorua.

Those charged with protecting us have to work by similar rules. And when they fail, as the FBI and CIA failed before Sept. 11, people get killed. But the burst of criticism a couple of weeks back was focused, ludicrously, on the notion that somehow George W Bush, the most scantily briefed leader in the known world, knew something in advance about the attacks, and should have told us. The past week's nonsense seems to have been a collective piss-take:okay, you want warnings, we'll give you warnings. And eventually everyone stopped listening.

Spooks are glamorized by the entertainment industry and protected by secrecy. Yet whenever the curtain does get lifted on real-life intelligence, it habitually reveals a culture of uselessness. The CIA would never hand over its list of potential terrorists to embassy officials in charge of visa applications. The FBI couldn't even send out pictures of suspected accomplices round the country on Sept. 11, because its computers weren't modern enough: They had to be posted. I'd have lent them my laptop had anyone asked.

But above all it's the inability of the CIA and FBI to get their act together that's so destructive. Turf wars are the besetting vice of a federal system and, as a fascinating article in Sunday's Los Angeles Times made clear, the two agencies still regard the chief enemy, not as al Qaeda, but each other. The flaws lie inside the bureaucracy, and the attacks should have been a signal to the president to root them out. Instead, his response to tragedy was to nuzzle ever more closely to both organizations, protecting them instead of the rest of us.

Americans have responded as sensibly as anyone could this weekend by trying to forget about it all. They're not being ridiculous. Their leaders are. The people deserve better than this.