Secret Bush directive to agencies targets terrorism
The White House release today of its national security strategy follows the signing last week of a classified directive that gave new orders to government agencies specifying and streamlining their roles in the war on terrorism. In the classified directive, the National Counterterrorism Center was ordered to come up with a plan in 90 days. The NCTC has already compiled a database of some 200,000 suspected terrorists or terrorist facilitators, and the deputy director of the center, Kevin Brock, said that law enforcement in the United States is turning up about 60 legitimate "hits" a day on that list.
The Bush administration's long-awaited rewrite of its national security strategy, the keystone document for guiding national security policy, was unveiled by senior White House adviser Stephen Hadley. In a change from the September 2002 version that said that neither religion nor ideology was the enemy, the new document describes the terrorist threat as a "murderous ideology" that requires both military forces and a "battle of ideas" to defeat. The terrorists "exploit the proud religion of Islam to serve a violent political vision," which aims at "the establishment ... of a totalitarian empire that denies all political and religious freedom."
The White House strategy places new emphasis on building partnerships with other nations, though it also reaffirms the doctrine of pre-emption laid out in 2002, by which the administration vowed to act against emerging threats from weapons of mass destruction. Iran, which is believed to be developing a nuclear weapons capability, came in for a veiled warning. Diplomacy to dissuade Iran "must succeed if confrontation is to be avoided," the 49-page document says. Rising power China was also chided for a "mercantilist" approach to locking up energy supplies, although the document outlines a policy of encouraging China on a constructive, nonconfrontational path. The document calls for continuing transformation of the U.S. military and a similar process at the State Department, including the creation of a civilian reserve corps similar to the military reserves, to help in reconstruction and stabilization missions like the current one in Iraq. A new final chapter calls for attention to global challenges such as AIDS, smuggling, and environmental destruction.
A week before the release of the national security strategy, a classified directive was signed by the president. The National Security Presidential Directive gives new marching orders to each agency for its role in the war on terrorism. That classified document is colabeled as National Security Presidential Directive 46 and 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," Brock said. The database currently has 325,000 names on it, including aliases, so Brock estimates there are 200,000 individuals on it. He said the database is being provided to local law enforcement and is proving to be 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 responds in one of three ways, depending on the federal instructions. Local police may arrest the individual if there is an outstanding warrant. They may inform a local joint counterterrorism task force. Or they may collect and send in further information about the individual.
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