The Congressional report on the intelligence failures before the Sept. 11 attacks, along with last week’s warning of possible airline hijackings by Al Qaeda, are reminders that the global terrorist threat is as worrisome as ever. Unfortunately, the White House and Congress are in a tug of war over how best to counter it. Both insist on the need for better intelligence, but they can’t agree on who should provide it and how much to spend on it. For its part, the White House is going ahead with its plan to create the Terrorist Threat Integration Center, which would be made up of staff members from the Central Intelligence Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation and Department of Homeland Security, but would report to the director of central intelligence. To old hands this arrangement looks awfully familiar — it seems like just an enlarged version of the current C.I.A.-based counterterrorist center, which was created two decades ago by fusing several agency branches and adding representatives from other intelligence agencies and the F.B.I. The main difference seems to be that the new center would (eventually) be housed away from the agency’s Langley, Va., campus. Full Story
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