Organizations and institutions have cultures. Cultures set boundaries for acceptable behavior. Who do you blame when an institution's culture directly led to 9/11? The Clinton Administration and Jamie Gorelick are too easy targets. Cultures are not created overnight. They take years to develop into routines that are followed without a second thought. To claim that a single memo and a new Adminstration could change a culture is to overlook mountains of research on bureaucratic behavior.

Clinton and Gorelick should both be blamed for reinforcing and bolstering an institutional culture that limited the sharing of intelligence with law enforcement, but that culture has deeper roots. Its foundations are in the institutional design laid by Congress dividing intelligence gathering from enforcement and in the Carter Administratian's over correcting of perceived Nixon era abuses.

Even so, the Clinton Administration and Jamie Gorelick did nothing to correct this culture. In fact, all indications are that they made things worse. But making a dysfunctional culture worse is a far cry from claiming that they are responsible for creating the culture.

This story, told by an veteran Intel. operative over at Captain's Quarters, is precisely the kind of thing one would expect to hear from a bureucrat working in any number of government agencies. For some reason, though, we expect this kind of behavior at the DMV, but not the FBI, CIA, or DIA. We all hope our Intel agencies are run by characters resembling 'M' from the James Bond movies. Unfortunately, it seems, our Intel agencies have been run by those who have more in common with Patty and Selma Bouviere, the twin sisters of Marge Simpson who man the window at the Springfield DMV, than MacGyver. Captain's Quarters:

"Yeah," the head DIA guy said, a bit sheepishly, "they are DIA, but theyÂ’re a different part of DIA and we canÂ’t talk to them." [That's the only quote from the meeting where I recall actual words spoken.]

We blinked a few times, and then all consideration of terrorism was dropped from the task. But not before it was pointed out that we and DIA werenÂ’t really counter-terrorism experts [although we were threat assessment experts], that the problem was probably being worked by so-&-so and such-&-such, and that they probably had better data, more experience, more resources than we did.

That is what Clinton and Gorelik's Wall culture did. It just didn't just prevent more effective cooperation and data sharing; it prevented the whole question of terrorism being addressed in a coherent fashion at all. No one was working the problem effectively, but I bet they all thought -- just like we were told – that someone else was. That’s the "I thought you brought the matches" school of intelligence analysis, and that was the end effect of Clinton's intelligence policy: it turned the whole process of intelligence into one big game of "Who brought the matches?"

And on 9/11 we found out who: Al Qaeda brought the matches.

Posted by: Rusty at 02:50 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
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