And here’s where it’s become unfortunate that mainstream political discourse has created negative connotations around a “law enforcement approach to terrorism.”
I can guarantee you that if you said to someone, “Hey, do you think that in terrorism investigations, we should create the perspective amongst counterterrorists that their job doesn’t stop until someone is neutralized?” they would say “Yes.” Well, you goddamn hippie: you’ve got a law enforcement mindset. I guess people don’t understand this enough, but intelligence analysts approach their craft rather differently. They look for patterns in information, and pass those patterns up the chain. They do not investigate in the sense of the word that you and I understand from TV. That’s why there was no APB inside the CIA or the National Counterterrorism Center on Abdulmutallab after his father’s walk-in. Abdulmutallab, in the intelligence world, is a data point. He is not a suspect.
Now, if you had the FBI handling the Abdulmutallab portfolio, or people who think like FBI agents, maybe it still doesn’t go anywhere. But maybe they start compiling information and building a case and new information turns up and the guy gets yanked before he’s on the plane. I gather that’s what John Brennan meant when he said yesterday there was “no one intelligence entity or team or task force [that] was assigned responsibility for doing that follow-up investigation.” None of this is to say the FBI has to be given the lead for these sorts of things. A joint approach is the right approach if you want to see everyone’s information. But it is to say that within that joint entity, analysts need — wait for it — a law enforcement approach to terrorism.
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