AnnotatedOpinions.com

PRESIDENT OBAMA made a bow toward transparency yesterday when he described how he intended to correct the security lapses that enabled Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to board a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas Day with explosives sown into his underwear. . .  

. . . the near-miss on Christmas Day also highlights the need to streamline the overlapping bureaucracies that were tasked with monitoring terrorist threats after Sept. 11, 2001.  

. . . a more basic structural change is needed: to reestablish the links between collectors of intelligence and analysts that were severed in 2004, when the government moved most of its analysts into the Counter Terrorism Center. . . there is too little direct communication between the agents on the ground and those analyzing their reports.  

[AO: The intelligence failures that led to the failed Christmas Day terrorist attack in Detroit should never again be allowed to occur. To that end, the Boston Globe suggests that a basic structural change needed to forestall similar failures in the future is to increase communication between intelligence analysts and gatherers. As a means of effecting this suggestion, the Globe recommends reorganizing the intelligence community to eliminate excessive bureaucracy.  

But it is not clear that excessive bureaucracy was the cause of the intelligence failure. It is also not clear why increasing communication between intelligence gatherers and analysts, beyond current levels of communication, is necessary. Unfortunately, the Globe provides no answers. It doesn’t explain why an intelligence information gatherer can’t convey all necessary and useful information to an analyst without direct personal communications with the analyst.  

The conclusion of the White House intelligence review seems correct: a reorganization of the intelligence or broader counterterrorism community is not required to address future similar intelligence failures.  

The other changes endorsed by President Obama, such as sharing of databases, will do much to increase security and prevent future terrorist attacks. Reorganizing the intelligence community for the purposes suggested by the Globe will not. ]