Defence failure keeps US in firing line

AMERICA is as wide open to terrorist attack today as it was on September 11 despite billions of dollars spent on heightened security and the establishment of an entirely new government department tasked with defending the American homeland.

Security experts and political opponents say a combination of bureaucratic inertia, poor government oversight and inter-agency rivalry has neutered efforts to date and that the Bush administration is guilty of posturing in its commitment to defending the country. They say all the real money and effort is being spent overseas on a war against terrorism that is producing questionable results.

The attack by a lone gunman at Los Angeles airport on the July 4 holiday shocked the nation, but after copious warnings that much worse might have happened Americans heaved a collective sigh of relief.

Such relief is misplaced, according to one investigation of civil defence in the city thought most likely to be al-Qaeda’s prime target, Washington DC. Despite being given $54m to prepare against biological terrorism the city is not even close to a coherent bio-warfare strategy according to the investigation’s secret report seen by Scotland on Sunday.

A number of flaws in disaster planning were exposed but the most damning of all, the report says, is that among all the agencies involved in civil defence none knew which was in charge. The investigators say this is a pattern being repeated across the country at local and national level.

Well-documented failures by the FBI to listen to warnings from their own agents about potential terrorists taking flying lessons at US flight schools pre-September 11 were mirrored by failures in the CIA and the National Security Agency to interpret properly overseas intelligence that might have prevented the attacks.

Acknowledgement of such failure has not led to a dramatic change in efficiency at either agency, despite public vows to co-operate with each other and to end the fratricidal war of a thousand leaks by which each discredited the other .

Short-term efforts at defending the country have been disturbingly ineffective. A recent study showed that in surprise visits to 32 major airports, federal inspectors were able to sneak fake guns, bombs and other weapons past security screeners on average 24% of the time. A professor of Middle Eastern studies who volunteered in the week after September 11 to assist the FBI’s understaffed Arabic language section has yet to be processed by the agency’s bureaucracy.