Ashcroft Needs a Security Division

While Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft faces criticism about the Justice Department’s immediate response to the recent terrorist attacks, Congress should press him on another issue of profound importance:

What is being done to create a permanent national security structure within the Justice Department to coordinate efforts to detect, prevent and respond to future terrorist threats?

Ashcroft recently announced his intention to overhaul the Justice Department to fight the war against terrorism, but he provided few details. Will he support the formation of a new national security division within the department to lead the law enforcement effort on the home front?

The department already has separate antitrust, civil, civil rights, criminal, environment and tax divisions in Washington, as well as 93 U.S. attorneys’ offices across the country. Yet unlike the FBI, the Justice Department has no stand-alone division devoted specifically to national security. Instead, the department’s national security functions are scattered, without a central forum to ensure comprehensive leadership and coordination. The department needs a national security division to perform four principal functions:

* Ensure top-down cohesion as the Justice Department’s primary law enforcement agencies--the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration, Immigration and Naturalization Service and the U.S. Marshals Service--retool to fight terrorism. FBI Director Robert S. Mueller should be applauded for his reported decision to start moving the FBI away from crimes such as smaller bank robberies and narcotics offenses that are better handled by other agencies. But more planning needs to be done to set priorities for the more than 60,000 agents and support staff at these four organizations as they face emerging threats such as cyber-warfare and attacks on nuclear facilities and water supplies.

* Form a team of experienced national security and terrorism prosecutors to lead or assist in any possible criminal or military trials of captured terrorists. These trials will present mammoth challenges. The 1942 military trials of eight Nazi saboteurs who landed by submarine on the shores of New York and Florida were prosecuted by a team led by Atty. Gen. Francis Biddle in a makeshift courtroom inside the Justice Department. No similar trials have occurred since then, so planning with the Defense Department is essential.

* Provide a permanent forum for the real-time sharing of information from the intelligence community with prosecutors and agents. The recently enacted USA Patriot Act should help facilitate this. At the same time, the new division should develop the expertise to serve as Justice’s principal intelligence liaison with the White House, CIA and other intelligence agencies as well as congressional intelligence committees.

* Incorporate the functions now performed by the department’s little-known Office of Intelligence Policy and Review, whose over-extended attorneys seek to assist FBI agents in obtaining national security wiretaps from the special court that approves these classified applications. A better model is the one employed in criminal cases, in which prosecutors in U.S. attorneys’ offices work alongside law enforcement agents both to develop wiretap applications and to provide legal guidance on the course of those investigations.

Late last month, President Bush signed an appropriations law that requires him, in the next budget cycle, to submit a proposal to restructure the Justice Department’s counterterrorism efforts. A new national security division would certainly fit the bill.

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Jonathan D. Schwartz served as a federal prosecutor from 1991 to 1995 and as senior advisor to the U.S. attorney general and deputy attorney general from 1995 to 2001.