Given the Orlando and San Bernardino terror attacks — ex-CIA officer John Kiriakou thinks that the FBI is incompetent — Is he right?

© 2016 Peter Free

15 June 2016

 

Is this scapegoating or something accurate about the Orlando terror slaughter?

John Kiriakou, a former CIA operations officer is a perceptive writer about American foreign policy and terrorism. He said recently:

 

[S]omething ought to change, and quickly: that is the consistent failure of the FBI to do its job, to infiltrate domestic and foreign terrorist groups, and to prevent attacks on U.S. soil.

FBI officials . . . had interviewed [Orlando massacre-ist, Omar] Mateen in 2013 and 2014. The interviews were conducted because he had expressed support for a suicide bomber. And still the FBI did nothing.

FBI Director James Comey said . . . that the FBI is “highly confident” that Mateen was radicalized, probably by viewing extremist material on the internet.

Even after the National Security Agency had swallowed up every piece of metadata on the entire internet and, presumably had its Cray computers analyze and pass actionable intelligence onto the FBI, it did nothing.

This is a longstanding pattern. After Syed Farook killed 14 people in a shooting in San Bernardino, Calif., last year [seehere], the FBI said it was aware that Farook had been in contact with terrorism suspects but that its agents had done nothing about it.

The FBI’s ongoing, long-term incompetence has led to the deaths of far too many Americans.

President Obama should immediately demand the FBI director’s resignation.

© 2016 John Kiriakou, Obama Should Demand FBI Director James Comey’s Resignation Today, TruthDig (13 June 2016) (excerpts)

 

Perhaps it is a little early to demand resignations

Whether Mr. Kiriakou is right, I do not know. We do not have the information that the FBI had.

Being ex-law enforcement myself, there are two broad issues that the FBI has to deal with:

First, there is the large matter of Fourth Amendment protections and probable cause requirements that the Bureau has to observe. One cannot just scoop up nasty-thinking people because they may someday pose a threat.

Here, I doubt that a CIA background lends itself to thoroughly understanding the legal constraints that honorably done domestic policing faces.

Second, and perhaps more critically in Orlando and San Bernardino, the FBI is probably hampered by inadequate surveillance resources. Not enough people. Not enough time. This, of course, is certainly something that the CIA also faces.

 

Think about the scope of resources that quality surveillance requires

Done properly, surveillance requires substantial numbers of people, so that one can stay out of sight and/or be unrecognized. Tailing people without being detected is really, really hard.

For that reason, effective surveillance is very costly. It requires lots of changing personnel, different vehicles, different patterns of blending in, and so on. Buckets of money are necessary to pay for it all. Around the clock.

Watching and trailing suspicious people generally take long periods of time.  Money has to flow while apparently unproductive days dribble by. Until that one day, at the end of the string, finally produces the “sure enough” evidence that criminal activity is going to occur.

 

American priorities do not slant toward expensive footwork

Americans are about gizmos. Taking the “easy machine” way. We fund massive technological endeavors like those conducted by the NSA. Which amuses itself by scooping up all sorts of (mostly worthless) information about ordinary people.

In the NSA’s scooping endeavor, virtually no one (and no algorithm) will ever be able to make heads or tails of the stuff it collects. Operation Scoop will never efficiently convert itself into genuinely efficient human intelligence. Instead, the gathered “intel” will lie around, just waiting for some officious miscreant to use it (for other reasons) against the person it characterizes.

Meanwhile, the FBI and presumably the CIA overseas, are both hampered by not having enough “blend in” people on the ground. The Blend in Crew are the people we need to do the — unglamorous, no quick fix — hour to hour tramping and talking — that good intelligence and police work both require.

 

Bad funding and ineffective prioritizations do not always equate with incompetence

My guess is that the FBI agents involved with surveilling both recent terrorist suspects made judgment calls.

These assessments probably stood up well at the time, with regard to both legal constraints and what the agents knew. The agents likely had only limited surveillance resources to invest in apparently unpromising investigations.

 

On the other hand, maybe Mr. Kiriakou is absolutely correct

Perhaps the FBI did have the resources, but did not use them intelligently. Perhaps the agents were too impatient for results. Maybe their bosses were.

 

The moral? — Someone with the authority to dig, needs to find out whether the FBI made mistakes

We can hope that the Obama Administration will investigate what went wrong and try to fix it. But don’t count on it. The American Establishment tends to lumber along with the goal of meeting the priorities of its fiefdoms. Being effective at actually doing what we pretend to be doing is not one of these.

The NSA, for example, will not be happy, if some of its money is diverted to giving the FBI more ground agents.

Meanwhile people die. Arguably preventably.