Hamilton Amplifies Chorus of Criticism From 9/11 Panel

WASHINGTON (Jan. 7) -- The vice chairman of the 9/11 Commission charged that "complacency set in" after the 2001 terrorist attacks and blamed "human failure" for not preventing the Christmas Day bomb plot to blow up an American airliner over Detroit.

While there has been some progress, former Democratic congressman Lee Hamilton said, "I do not feel that homeland security is at the highest priority level of the government. It's true today, it's been true in recent years. It may be that this Detroit incident will change that."

Hamilton spoke just hours before President Barack Obama was to address the nation with the results of his administration's review of the botched plot by a Nigerian man sent by al-Qaida operatives in Yemen.

His comments to a breakfast meeting of reporters was part of a growing chorus of complaints from former 9/11 commissioners who have defended the intelligence overhaul conducted at their behest even as they said their key recommendation was ignored by Congress. Hamilton agreed with former Sen. Bob Kerrey, who in a column for Sphere blamed lawmakers for not streamlining intelligence oversight and funding.

Hamilton, who last week told Sphere the Nigerian's plot reminded him of a "rerun of the movie," predicted Obama would reveal "rather dramatic" examples of missed intelligence in the White House review. Hours earlier, a senior official in Yemen said Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab had met al-Qaida operatives, including the radical American-born cleric, Anwar al-Awlaki, linked to the Fort Hood shootings.

As in that attack by a Muslim Army officer, there were missed signals. Still, Hamilton rejected critics who lay the blame on structural changes in the intelligence agencies that his panel trumpeted.

In 2004, following the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission, Congress established the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to oversee the CIA and 15 other civilian and military intelligence agencies. It also set up a National Counterterrorism Center to synthesize and analyze the enormous stream of data that flows into intelligence agencies every day.

"You've got 16 agencies that are trying to protect their turf, many of them with the Defense Department," Hamilton said. "A lot of people simply didn't like our recommendation -- 'another bureaucratic layer' was the way it was expressed in the intelligence community. Yet somewhere in the government you have to have someone who forces the sharing of information and somewhere in the government you have to bring together all of the bites of data our government generates every day for the purposes of analysis."

Hamilton said any effort to change the intelligence structure could take three to five years and in the end, "We still need an overarching authority in the intelligence community," he said. "We can't go back to 16 stovepipes."

Hamilton, who is also a member of the President's Intelligence Advisory Board, said, "People should lose their job if they missed a signal," adding that he expected most of the slip-ups were among mid-level officials. Still, he did not rule out the possibility that responsibility might lie further up the chain of command.

"Accountability is less important to me than correcting the flaws," he said. "I have no doubt those guys in Yemen are examining this thing just like we're examining this thing and saying, 'OK, where did we screw up?' They wouldn't use that language exactly, but the Arabic equivalent of it. And they're going to try to correct it. They're going to come at us again."

And while Hamilton expected intelligence analysis to improve after the lessons of Christmas Day are absorbed, he also was realistic.

"We're never going to produce a system that is totally flawless," he said. "You can't get this down to zero mistakes."