I'm submitting this because (a) there are so many reports that this may be the week/month for another false flag attack, and (b) when 9/11 occurred there were many anomalies in the command structure that provided a convenient excuse for inaction.

Analysis: US terror center lacks mil intel

By SHAUN WATERMAN
UPI Homeland and National Security Editor

WASHINGTON, March 30 (UPI) -- For more than four months there have been no representatives of military intelligence in the 24-hour operations room at the heart of the U.S. National Counter-Terrorism Center, or NCTC -- the hub of federal efforts to share real-time terrorist threat information between U.S. agencies.

Three representatives of the Defense Intelligence Agency were withdrawn from the operations center last November, according to NCTC Spokesman Carl Kropf. A representative of Northern Command, or Northcom, the U.S. military command with responsibility for the defense of the continental United States, had been withdrawn earlier, he told United Press International.

"It was the (Defense Intelligence Agency) director's decision," he said.

No one at the agency's press office responded to e-mail or telephone messages requesting comment Wednesday and Thursday.

A Northcom spokesman, Sean Kelly, said only that "The mission (of the Northcom assignee) was changed and ... the individual was withdrawn." He added the officer was currently based at the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Kropf played down the impact of the move and said efforts were ongoing to get the officials back on station. "One will start back in the next few weeks," he said, "the others we hope by the end of April."

"It's not like the information flow has ceased," he said. "We are still in touch with them on a minute-by-minute basis."

But some observers remain concerned. Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., the chairman of the Senate Armed Service's Committee called the situation "unacceptable."

In previously unreported remarks, he told a March 8 committee hearing the officials had been withdrawn "because Northcom and the Defense Intelligence Agency found that it was just too hard to get information and cooperation from the NCTC."

The center, and the Information Sharing Environment of which it is a part, were mandated by Congress in the huge 2004 intelligence reform law in an effort to ensure against a repetition of the pre-Sept. 11 failure of U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies to pool knowledge about the hijackers that might have prevented the attacks.

But the vision of a seamless network of networks -- from within which analysts, investigators and military and intelligence operations planners can reach out and drill down into any U.S. government information they need -- has bumped up against the reality of complex and overlapping rules and regulations governing the ways different agencies can acquire and use information, especially about Americans.

In prepared testimony for the March hearing, Air Force Lt. Gen. Victor Renuart, who assumed command of Northcom last week, said intelligence officers from the command's headquarters continued to participate in a daily video conference held by the NCTC operations center.

He said his command was working with Centcom -- U.S. Central Command, which runs military operations in the Middle East including Iraq and Afghanistan -- and the Defense Intelligence Agency "in an NCTC process improvement initiative to optimize the information-sharing environment."

He said the officer assigned to the center would return there "after the successful completion of the process improvement initiative noted above, which will determine his new duties."

John Rollins, an analyst at the Congressional Research Service who follows information-sharing issues, said the problem was the restrictive rules and procedures governing intelligence officers assigned to the NCTC. "When someone is assigned to NCTC, they sign (an agreement) outlining the rules of the road," he said, "Individuals cannot provide information back to their parent agencies or departments without prior clearance from senior NCTC leadership."

Rollins, a former intelligence official at the Department of Homeland Security, said that when NCTC's predecessor, the multi-agency clearinghouse called the Terrorist Threat Integration Center, was first stood up in 2004 two Homeland Security analysts were "summarily kicked out" of the center for passing information back to the department.

"In some ways," he said, "the information flow is designed to be one-way" into the NCTC.

Intelligence from a huge variety of sources, and in an enormous range of states -- from the most raw to the highly finished -- pours into the NCTC every day. Analysts at the center produce finished intelligence reports which are widely disseminated among counter-terrorism officials.

But there are much greater restrictions on the raw, unfiltered intelligence that the center uses in its finished products and to monitor terrorist threats in real-time.

"There are good reasons" for restrictions on certain kinds of information, said Rollins, citing data from or about ongoing criminal investigations, or from particularly sensitive human or technical sources.

Nonetheless, he said, the effect of the restrictions as they currently seemed to be implemented was that NCTC was "not working as it was originally supposed to."

Another former Homeland Security official, William Parrish, who helped stand up the first version of the NCTC, advocated for a bright line over which the military should not step.

"I am not in favor of our military being involved in domestic intelligence," he told UPI, "That is not what our Constitution envisages."

Parrish, a retired U.S. Marine Corps colonel who now teaches at Virginia Commonwealth University, said that the Defense Intelligence Agency had always had a liaison to the center, but that the role of Northcom was different, because its area of responsibility was the United States itself.

"Domestic intelligence reporting (for instance about possible threats to U.S. military facilities) should be and is appropriately shared through channels" with Northcom, he said, but "I am not in favor of our military being involved in the collection of intelligence about U.S. citizens. That is the FBI's job."