I'm of the opinion that this will be an excellent initiative, if they do it right. I'm reassured that they might, from quotes in the article:
The center, according to the White House, "will have unfettered access to all terrorist threat intelligence information, from raw reports to finished analytic assessments, available to the U.S. government."This is smart. "Need to know," is all well and good for a guideline, but if you have people in the community who are tasked soley with intelligence analysis, then in order for them to do their jobs effectively, they "need to know" everything....
I realize that there are some folks who will be disturbed at the thought of the CIA involving itself with any sort of domestic activities, but as they aren't actually involved in any operations, only analysing the reports that come out of them, I don't see this as an issue. Likewise, I'm no more disturbed by the idea of the CIA gathering information about me than I am the FBI. I'd prefer that neither of them do it. I've long thought the CIA's prohibition against domestic intelligence gathering should be refined to exclude non-citizens, because if there are hostile foreign nationals on our home soil, I'd like both the FBI and the CIA watching out for them...
Not that they'll be able to do much good until the INS stops acting retarded. Michelle Malkin reports that
the R visa program, created by Congress in 1990, gives visas to thousands of foreigners to fill alleged domestic shortages among ministries, nunneries, and other religious professionals. In 1998, some 11,000 foreigners received such visas. According to a 1999 General Accounting Office report, federal investigators have discovered R visa fraud rings involving churches and other religious institutions based in Colombia, Fiji and Russia.I don't think the INS gets nearly enough abuse for its role in undermining our national security. As a first generation american on my father's side (my mother's side has relatives that fought in the revolution), I am strongly pro-immigration. I have no wish to see our borders shut down, but I can see why other folks might want to, since the INS is clearly incapable of keeping the bad guys out.
The mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, Sheik Omar Abdul Rahman, had an R visa. So did four Palestinian men who worked for the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development and the Islamic Association for Palestine ? both Muslim charities that the State Department has linked to the terrorist organization Hamas.
Given the liberties being taken with the Bill of Rights under the Patriot Acts, I wonder when the logical step of putting both the CIA and FBI under the same boss at Homeland Security is going to be proposed. Prior to 2001 most pundits were afraid of these two agencies sharing too much data.
I would think that (with some exceptions) the CIA and the FBI would not be within the same organization. The reason is the CIA is for the collection of (usually) non-military intelligence on foreign targets, while the FBI is for the investigation of domestic 'criminal' activities, which would include collecting some domestic intelligence. The mission of each is usually incompatible with each other, though there are of course exceptions, terrorism is one glaring example.
My suggestion is to keep an eye out for any changes to the powers of the FBI and any change to the 'mission statement' of the CIA. By maintaining vigilance, we should be able to stop them or at least challenge the reasoning of any changes that could negatively affect our privacy and/or constitutional rights.
Alexander: That was precisely my point, although I didn't expand sufficiently. If you split the CIA into a defense related half and a counter intelligence and counter terrorism half, and split the FBI into a crime detection half and a counter intelligence and counter terrorism half, then you have the four parts to realign the whole system. Put the counter intelligence and counter terrorism parts together under Homeland Security and give the other remnants to DoD and DoJ respectively. At the very least, it eliminates a whole agency directorate, at the cost of creating a US KGB.