Bush national security strategy to be unveiled
The Bush administration's long-awaited rewrite of its national security strategy, the keystone document for guiding national security policy, is to be unveiled Thursday. National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley will release the document, which covers the full gamut of challenges from rising powers like China to the ongoing war on terrorism, Iraq, and other so-called irregular wars.
For over a year, the administration has been working on the revision of its original strategy, issued in September 2002, as well as a new National Security Presidential Directive designed to give marching orders to each agency for its role in the war on terrorism. That classified document was signed by President Bush last week, as National Security Presidential Directive 46. It was colabeled Homeland Security Presidential Directive 15, since it also directs domestic agencies on their responsibilities.
A major goal of the new NSPD was to resolve discrepancies among previous presidential directives and chronic conflicts among agencies with overlapping responsibilities: The State and Defense departments have wrangled over jurisdiction for the war on terrorism in countries where the United States is not at war, and the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security have had similar turf disputes at home. The Central Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon have both claimed roles in intelligence collection abroad.
Now it falls to the National Counterterrorism Center, created by the post-9/11 legislation last year and headed by Adm. Scott Redd, to make sure each entity does what it has been ordered to do. Congress created the NCTC and gave it two mandates: to fuse the intelligence from all the disparate U.S. intelligence and law enforcement entities (as was not done before 9/11) and to conduct "strategic operational planning" across all those agencies to ensure there is a common counterterrorism plan implemented at home and abroad.
Among other things, the NCTC maintains a database of "people we want to know about because we believe they are linked to terrorism," NCTC Deputy Director Kevin Brock said Tuesday. The database has 325,000 names on it currently, including aliases, so Brock estimates there are 200,000 individuals on it. He said the database is being provided to local law enforcement, and it is proving to be very useful.
"Local law enforcement is responding," he said. "We are getting about 120 hits a day, and about half of them are real."
Law enforcement then responds in one of three ways, depending on the federal instructions. It may arrest the individual if there is an outstanding warrant. It may inform the local joint counterterrorism task force. Or it may collect and send in further information about the individual.