Tag Archives: Michael Leiter

Michael Leiter Resigns, Undermining Claimed Rationale for Mueller Extension

By:  Friday June 10, 2011 8:05 am

National Counterterrorism Center head Michael Leiter resigned yesterday.

I’m agnostic about whether that’s a good thing or not. NCTC got most of the blame for missing the UndieBomber, which Leiter exacerbated by going off on a ski vacation just after the attempted attack. But Leiter supposedly made some improvements at NCTC.

But I am rather curious about the timing (along with the trial balloons about Hillary and the World Bank, though State has aggressively denied them).

After all, we spent most of Wednesday morning, during Robert Mueller’s confirmation hearing for an unusual two-year extension, talking about the importance of continuity. Mueller has to stick around not solving the anthrax case and not investigating Lloyd Blankfein for two more years, it was explained, because the current CIA Director is about to become Secretary of Defense, after which a current top General will become CIA Director. The justification for Mueller’s extension was that we need continuity at a time of great change, particularly in the aftermath of Osama bin Laden’s death and the lead-up to the 10th anniversary of 9/11.

Now, granted, NCTC head isn’t as senior a position as CIA or FBI Director. But it is, obviously, right in the thick of our preparations for the 9/11 anniversary.

So, uh, were all the stated concerns about continuity just a ruse?

 


WH Stenographer: Obama Took Big Risk in Deciding to Go after Bin Laden

By:  Saturday May 7, 2011 6:51 am

There’s not all that much in this Bob Woodward piece on the raid to get Osama bin Laden that hasn’t already been reported generally elsewhere: just some details about the surveillance leading up to the raid (which I’ll discuss below) and a cute anecdote about how they measured bin Laden’s corpse to make sure it was taller than six feet.

When bin Laden’s corpse was laid out, one of the Navy SEALs was asked to stretch out next to it to compare heights. The SEAL was 6 feet tall. The body was several inches taller.

After the information was relayed to Obama, he turned to his advisers and said: “We donated a $60 million helicopter to this operation. Could we not afford to buy a tape measure?”

So it’s fair, I guess, to take the article’s selected emphasis as the narrative the White House wanted told. And that narrative focuses on what a risky decision it was to approve the raid.

The [phone call between Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti and a friend, from which Woodward includes direct quotes] and several other pieces of information, other officials said, gave President Obama the confidence to launch a politically risky mission to capture or kill bin Laden, a decision he took despite dissension among his key national security advisers and varying estimates of the likelihood that bin Laden was in the compound.

To communicate what a difficult decision it was, Woodward provides the competing estimates of the chances that they had really discovered OBL.

Several assessments concluded there was a 60 to 80 percent chance that bin Laden was in the compound. Michael Leiter, the head of the National Counterterrorism Center, was much more conservative. During one White House meeting, he put the probability at about 40 percent.

When a participant suggested that was a low chance of success, Leiter said, “Yes, but what we’ve got is 38 percent better than we have ever had before.”

To back that up, Woodward provides details about the limits of the US intelligence. Of note, Woodward describes that the US was never able to positively ID OBL, in spite of the fact that a man–presumably OBL–paced around the compound for an hour or two every day. While Woodward doesn’t say whether the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency was able to get a view of his face (the implication is it was not), he does say that the absence of any information about the size of windows or walls in the compound made it difficult to even measure the height of the pacing man.

So we can take two lessons from the story President Obama’s top advisers leaked to Bob Woodward. First, Obama took a pretty big chance when he ordered SEALs to jump into a compound in the middle of a Pakistani garrison town. And second, if you want to evade our surveillance, keep your battery out of your cell phone until you’re at least 90 minutes away from your stationary location and build that location such that any outside space offers no features to allow the NGA to get a good read on you.


In First Act as DNI, James Clapper Adds to Redundancy Competitive Analysis

By:  Friday August 20, 2010 11:34 am

When James Clapper testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee, he rejected one of the central criticisms in the WaPo’s Top Secret America series–that the redundancy in the Intelligence Community contributed to waste and intelligence failures.

Clapper disputed criticism of redundancy in intelligence programs, saying that duplication is sometimes a conscious decision. “One man’s duplication is another man’s competitive analysis,” he said.

Perhaps it should come as no surprise, then, that his first act as DNI is to add to the redundancy.

After my second week on the job, I wanted to let you know what an honor it is to be leading this Community of such skilled and dedicated professionals.

When President Obama asked me to lead the Intelligence Community he said he wanted someone who would continue to build our enterprise into an integrated team.  I have begun to embark on that process and wanted to share with you a few of my initial thoughts and plans.

I have asked DIA Deputy Director Robert Cardillo to join ODNI in the newly-created role of Deputy Director for Intelligence Integration.  While the specifics of this position are still being developed, it unites the roles of Analysis and Collection to elevate information sharing and collaboration between these two essential functions.

Admittedly, Clapper doesn’t explain what he just hired a top DOD intell guy to do, but it sure seems like it overlaps with the mandate of the National Counterterrorism Center.

NCTC serves as the primary organization in the United States Government for integrating and analyzing all intelligence pertaining to terrorism possessed or acquired by the United States Government (except purely domestic terrorism); serves as the central and shared knowledge bank on terrorism information; provides all-source intelligence support to government-wide counterterrorism activities; establishes the information technology (IT) systems and architectures within the NCTC and between the NCTC and other agencies that enable access to, as well as integration, dissemination, and use of, terrorism information.

NCTC serves as the principal advisor to the DNI on intelligence operations and analysis relating to counterterrorism, advising the DNI on how well US intelligence activities, programs, and budget proposals for counterterrorism conform to priorities established by the President.

And the move is all the more bizarre given that Clapper only has this job because the Administration chose to fire Dennis Blair rather than hold Michael Leiter, the Director of the NCTC, responsible for failing to connect the dots on the UndieBomber attack, even though it appears that Leiter deserves more of the blame. So if I’m right that this new position is duplicative of the NCTC position, then the Administration has chosen not to fire the guy most responsible for missing the UndieBomber clues, and instead fire the DNI and replace him with a guy that–rather than firing the guy most responsible for missing the UndieBomber clues–will instead just create a second version of that guy’s position.

Now in an ideal world, the next time someone misses an attack, we’ll be justified in firing Clapper, since he’s the guy who opted for redundancy rather than holding one person responsible. But I’m guessing by then Clapper will be capitalizing on his inevitably short tenure as DNI, getting rich heading six or eight intelligence contractors.


Keep Your Declaration of Independence Right Next to Your Assassination Cards

By:  Friday July 2, 2010 3:51 pm

Call me crazy, but this is probably not exactly the kind of treatment Thomas Jefferson was thinking the Declaration of Independence would receive 234 years after he wrote it.

Many nights an item prompts a call to wake the NCTC director, Michael Leiter, 41, the junior member of the nighthawks. He displays a copy of the Declaration of Independence, next to a deck of baseball-style cards of high-value terrorist targets: “I keep the ones who are dead on top. It’s a little macabre, but that’s the world we live in.” When the NCTC calls in the middle of the night, he is often half-awake.

Among those cards, after all, is probably the one that signifies that the President has approved, with no due process, an order to assassinate US citizen Anwar al-Awlaki. That’s the kind of thing that Jefferson objected to when he called the following “Despotism”:

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.

[snip]

For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:

[snip]

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:

[snip]

For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:

While I’m making wildarsed Fourth of July guesses, let me also suggest that this kind of security porn–a 24-style terror play in 9 acts–is probably not exactly what Thomas Jefferson imagined as the role of the free press when he so furiously defended it.


The Inexplicable Timing of Dennis Blair’s Ouster

By:  Thursday May 20, 2010 4:40 pm

I’m thoroughly unsurprised by the news of Dennis Blair’s ouster. After all, it’s an impossible job that appears to serve one purpose: to provide a deck chair you can rearrange every two years as a scapegoat for our continuing inability to detect terrorists even with all the surveillance toys we’ve got.

(Actually, if you’re Michael McConnell, it serves a second, more personal, purpose: giving you means to privatize intelligence for the benefit of your once and future employers.)

But I’ve got a few questions after I read the following on Twitter:

Chuck Todd: MT @SavannahGuthrie POTUS asked for Blair’s resignation; Blair appealed to Chief of Staff to make a rebuttal — an offer that went nowhere.

Major Garrett: + Feinstein: “I look forward to working with the President as he identifies his nominee.” Feinstein Cmte rpt final straw for Blair

That is, if you believe the tweets of the White House Press Corps, Blair was ousted by Obama (thoroughly unsurprising news) in response to the SSCI report on the Undie Bomber.

Now, that someone would be canned in response to the SSCI report is also thoroughly unsurprising. It’s a damning report, showing we’ve made little progress since 9/11. Now, several people–like Marc Ambinder and Jeff Stein–seem to think National Counterterrorism Center Director Michael Leiter should be the one canned over this report (and that’s even before you consider that Leiter went on vacation right after Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s attempted attack). Whoever gets canned, though, I’m actually a bit pleased that someone will be held responsible for some pretty big failures.

So I understand all that.

It’s the timing I don’t understand. As Ambinder reported earlier this week, this report is not new. It’s just new to us. The White House has had this report for two months.

The SSCI gave its report to the White House and the intelligence agencies two months ago, and an official told me last night that the the IC had made progress implementing many of its regulations. The new budget contains more authority for the DNI to make technical decisions more quickly, which should help with the database issues. A DNI official said that Blair “accepted” blame and is making necessary changes.

If the White House were going to fire Blair in response to the report, why didn’t he get fired two months ago? Why let him start fixing thing (you know, shifting his deck chair), and then fire him?

Or did Rahm and Obama hold off on firing him until this report was declassified so he could serve as a very public scapegoat shortly after its release?