Intelligence Expert: U.S. Still Lags in Fighting Terrorism

The U.S. has made a few changes, but overall, lack of preparedness "is really a disaster,” said Herb Romerstein, former head of the U.S. Information Agency's Office to Counter Soviet Disinformation and Active Measures.

"We may be facing more of the same terrorist actions, and we’re still not prepared for them,” he said in an exclusive interview with NewsMax.com.

The slow pace of the Democrat-controlled Senate to confirm President Bush’s federal judicial nominees is not just a political or ideological issue, Romerstein believes. It could spell life or death in the war.

"Just look at what the old federal judges have done in the last couple of months,” says the co-author of "The Venona Secrets,” which blows the lid off Soviet subversion in the U.S. during and after the time that the Soviet Union posed as "our noble ally” in World War II.

Already one of the judges "threw out the part of the Patriot Act that prevents foreign terrorists from coming into the United States.”

"Another federal judge ... ordered the Justice Department to release the names of those people who were being held and interrogated about terrorism.” As long as those names are not public information, "those terrorists and their lawyers can’t mount a campaign to” free them.

"Can you imagine, once those names are available, the left-wing lawyers begin filing lawsuits to get them out of detention?”

When Congress passed the Patriot Act, the lawmakers neglected to remove the barriers to getting a warrant for a wiretap "on a terrorist or foreign agent operation.”

That very stumbling block hindered the FBI’s ability to go after Zacharias Moussaoui, facing charges as the "20th hijacker” on 9-11. Furthermore, that gap in the law remains today. Even the Kyl-Schumer bill in the Senate that seeks to rectify that situation is "a tiny step,” he says.

The 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act failed to modify some of the most egregious actions by Attorney General Levi in the Ford Administration that put severe restrictions on what the FBI could do to protect America.

As reported in June by NewsMax.com, former President Gerald Ford, citing "different times,” has urged that those restrictions be lifted.

Moreover, Attorney General John Ashcroft has crafted guidelines that allow the FBI to collect public information on terrorist activities or potential terrorist activities. Finally, the FBI is allowed to go to a public meeting and hear terrorists or subversives "preach violence.” Penetrating the groups themselves is another matter.

"[W]hat they can’t do,” complained Romerstein, ”is to be able to get really into the terrorist apparatus, either through a wiretap or through the placing of informants in the group.”

This is no small matter. The onetime investigator for the House Committee on Un-American Activities noted that "it takes many years to get informants into a position where they can provide you with valuable information.”

Foreign intelligence is no better. Despite an uproar last fall over a Clinton-era directive aimed at avoiding dealing with undercover informants who have "human rights” issues, a House panel just recently released a report saying nothing has been done to change that.

Romerstein cited a passage from the House Subcommittee on Terrorism and Homeland Security of the House Committee on Intelligence, which reads: "The extent of caution and burdensome vetting process resulting from the guidelines on the recruitment of foreign assets and sources issued in 1995 undermine the CIA’s ability and willingness to recruit assets, especially those who provide insights into terrorist organizations and the hard targets. Despite the statutory requirements of December, 2001 to rescind the 1995 guidelines, the DCI still has not done so at the time this report was completed.

Thus, the Clinton order, largely as a result of pressure from then Rep. (now Sen.) Robert Torricelli, D-N.J., still stands despite congressional legislation reversing it and despite the fact that Clinton has been gone for nearly 19 months. NewsMax last fall ran a series of exposés on this issue pointing out the folly of expecting undercover characters to be choirboys.

The man who has the responsibility to make the change is CIA Director George Tenet, a Clinton holdover who, by all accounts, has charmed his way into the Bush entourage.

Not for him to say, acknowledged Romerstein, noting that people with a view from inside those organizations are better able to judge.

"What we’re seeing is a great lack of effectiveness. Maybe it’s the bureaucracy. Maybe it’s the leadership. Maybe it’s a combination of both. But we really need a major shakeup in the intelligence industry,” he opined.

Even if Tenet or Mueller were to leave, he said, you can’t replace somebody with nobody. You need someone with proven stature.

"Where is the Bill Casey of today who could be appointed as director of the CIA and get the organization back to doing its job, as Casey did [under Reagan] in the 1980s?” he asked.

One can hope the proposed Department of Homeland Security accomplishes something, but it "certainly gives the impression of shifting the deck chairs on the Titanic,” though, of course, everyone is waiting to see exactly what final form it will take and who will be running it.

"Unless this new agency actually takes over and begins doing the job, and making sure that people get punished for not doing their jobs or promoted for doing their jobs, it’s not going to work," in Romerstein’s view.

That runs counter to the government employees unions that want "civil service” privileges for employees of the new department. President Bush is resisting that idea because he needs elbow room to hire and fire and shift personnel as the situation demands.

Administration people says such flexibility is as necessary here as it is with the military and intelligence agencies. That is a major reason the bill failed to pass the Democrat Senate before the August recess.

Romerstein is paying attention to the issue of turning over State Department consular services to the new Homeland Security Department. That entity can affect who gets into this country and who does not. It is a primary issue behind the "visa express” scandal. Professionals are needed to make sure that "foreign terrorists, foreign enemies of the United States, are not admitted” to this country, he argued.

"If you use the same junior State Department officers to do the job,” he warned, "it’s not going to get done. It’s the dirtiest job in an embassy, and it’s given to the youngest and most inexperienced officers. And they handle it the way young and inexperienced officers do.”

"If the police hear that a tall buxom blonde just held up a bank, they don’t question Whoopi Goldberg,” he said. "You look for the culprit in the environment that the culprit operated.”

"Most Arab Americans are loyal and should be encouraged to cooperate” with authorities when they see something suspicious, he said.

The Time magazine story that the Clinton people supposedly had a plan to deal with al-Qaeda terrorists and that the Bush administration dropped the ball is simply not credible, in Romerstein’s view.

The five-year professional staff member for the House Intelligence Committee finds "nothing that the Clinton people say credible,” no more credible that the anti-gun-rights ex-president’s vow to fight in the trenches to defend Israel if Iraq invades.

"This is a man who wouldn’t fight at all for his own country,” Romerstein observed, "and now he’s claiming he’ll fight to the death for another country. These people are unbelievable.”

Getting the U.S. in shape to do battle with terrorism on the homefront and guarding all the potential targets will be "a costly and manpower-intensive process.”

"It means putting guards in places we didn’t even think of guarding in the past. It means developing assets within the anti-American groups in the United States,” not just those who may be "ethnically anti-American,” but also those "who are born in the United States of American parents who, because of their leftist orientation, hate the United States. Those groups need to be penetrated. And that takes a lot of time and energy.”

It’s all well and good to talk about getting more analysts in the FBI and CIA, but first they need information to analyze, the veteran analyst cautioned. That is where much of the needed improvement in the intelligence community is to be found.

With the leftists so entrenced in Washington, it's hard to route them out without having them turn on you so bad you get taken down.

I wonder if Bush sometimes feels he's woken up in a bathtub full of venomous snakes and spiders?

You'd like to kill them all, but if you don't move slowly, they get you first.

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