Intelligence info sharing 'inept'

The 33 intelligence agencies have failed U.S. citizens by largely refusing to share information that would enable them to better picture what enemies are doing, Rep. Curt Weldon said.

"We knew what we should have done and we didn't do it," the Pennsylvania Republican said May 23 in a speech at the Heritage Foundation, a Washington, D.C., think tank.

The fact that al Qaeda operatives were able to strike the United States was not a huge surprise, said Weldon, a senior member of the House Armed Services Committee.

"I had seen the inept response of our intelligence community," he said. "I knew and we knew what we should have done, but they didn't do it because they were protecting their stovepipes."

Intelligence agencies have been so concerned about protecting their sphere of operations and have been so culturally opposed to sharing any data with other parts of the government that they fumbled the task of protecting the American public, Weldon said.

The 33 agencies that have some responsibility for intelligence information must build a "federal fusion center" where data can be collected from both public and private sources, analyzed by sophisticated data mining software, and presented to senior officials, he said.

In August 2000, for example, an Italian newspaper wrote a story about al Qaeda training kamikaze pilots, but U.S. intelligence organizations lack the ability to collect such data — information that could be critical in the war on terrorism.

Weldon praised the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency for creating its Information Awareness Office, which is headed by John Poindexter, former national security adviser for President Reagan. The office has been assigned the task of developing a prototype for a national collaboration center.

It will require agencies to overcome their proprietary instincts, he suggested.