Lack of Single Terror Suspect ‘Watch List’ Criticized

Three years after the lack of coordination among federal security agencies contributed to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the Department of Homeland Security has failed in its effort to create a single, comprehensive “watch list” of suspected terrorists, according to a government report released Friday.

“DHS is not fulfilling its responsibility under the Homeland Security Act,” said Clark Kent Ervin, inspector general of the Homeland Security Department, whose office conducted the study.

The department’s failure to produce a viable terrorist watch list stemmed primarily from a lack of leadership and intelligence agencies’ continued failure to coordinate information, the report said.

Without a central database containing the latest information about possible terrorists, border guards and other security personnel are hard-pressed to do their jobs, experts say. The absence of the watch list and information-sharing among agencies has been cited as a major factor in the Sept. 11 attacks.

The inspector general’s report comes at a critical time.

The administration’s handling of the war on terrorism has become a central issue in an unusually hard-fought presidential campaign. In the first presidential debate Thursday night, Democratic challenger Sen. John F. Kerry repeatedly accused President Bush of taking his eye off the ball and mismanaging the fight against terrorism, both at home and abroad.

Bush insisted that he had made difficult but correct decisions, both in launching the Iraq war and in his efforts to bolster domestic security.

And Congress is in the midst of a controversial effort to define the authority of a new national director of intelligence as part of a broad reform of the country’s defenses against terrorism.

Advocates of a strong national director saw Friday’s report as vindication of their position. It “underscores the need for a strong intelligence director,” said Leslie Phillips, spokeswoman for Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.). Lieberman and Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) are co-authors of an intelligence reform bill that provides for creation of a Cabinet-level director with far-reaching power over all intelligence agencies.

The Pentagon and other agencies, which would lose autonomy under such a system, have lobbied for a director with more limited authority.

What makes the new report unusually difficult for the administration to criticize or dismiss is that it was prepared by Homeland Security analysts, not an outside group.

Also, the issue of watch lists is particularly sensitive, because government investigators found early that they were one of the weak points in U.S. defenses.

Not having a single, unified watch list is “a fundamental flaw in the system,” Michael Greenberger, director of the Center for Health and Homeland Security at the University of Maryland, said. “You have people sitting at a desk [in the Terrorist Screening Center] running names through six different servers. You’re not getting accurate information, you can’t be sure each name is being run against the right list.

“One of the fundamental border control tools used in making the border safe is having one reliable watch list that all agencies -- that Immigration, the FBI, the CIA, all these agencies -- can look at,” he said. “Their failure to do this is just one in a long line that shows that the work to protect the homeland is not being done.”

In 2003, the Government Accountability Office -- the investigative arm of Congress formerly known as the General Accounting Office -- found that nine security agencies were using more than a dozen watch lists to screen for terrorist suspects.

By not taking up its mandated role as manager, the inspector general’s new report said, the Department of Homeland Security was leaving the challenge of consolidating watch lists to traditional intelligence groups, including the FBI and CIA.

The original call for a master watch list surfaced after the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, according to the Sept. 11 commission’s report. At that time, immigration services and the State Department set aside “seed money” to begin a list of suspected terrorists.

More than a decade later, the Sept. 11 commission found the information-gathering systems to be flawed. Intelligence agencies, ranging from the FBI and the CIA to more obscure organizations, had created their own watch lists from their own sets of guidelines, and routinely failed to match them with each other.

“A lot of the different watch-list systems that are set up by different agencies really need overarching architecture,” said Philip Zelikow, the Sept. 11 panel’s executive director. We need “a system of systems to do a better job of getting a government-wide approach” to identifying terrorist suspects.

Along with these guidelines, a system must be in place to deal with misinformation and mistakes, he said.

In addressing civil liberties, Ervin said that his office would soon be taking extra precautions to examine potential breaches of privacy.

According to the report, the master watch list should have been operational by spring 2003. Ervin said an initial watch list might be completed as early as December.