The Story Behind the State Department Terrorist Stats Fiasco

More reasons why Foggy Bottom shouldn't be trusted with anything more serious than inviting foreign leaders to dinner parties:

Last Wednesday, April 27, to explain the dissemination of the statistical breakdown, the agencies wisely dispatched two very able and accomplished officials: State’s top lawyer, Philip Zelikow, and the interim director of NCTC, John Brennan. Before coming to State this year, Zelikow was the top investigator for the 9/11 Commission. One of the commission’s chief recommendations was the creation of NCTC, and that proposal was adopted by statute when Congress overhauled the intelligence community in December 2004.

This is germane for several reasons. By law, the primary mission of the NCTC is to be the government’s “shared knowledge bank on known and suspected terrorists and international terror groups[.]” That means, as a practical matter, that the NCTC, not the State Department, ought to be doing things like compiling annual reports on global terrorism. But there’s a problem. The law by which Congress has for several years required an annual report dictates that the report is State’s responsibility — which may have made sense before there was an NCTC but doesn’t now.

The Bush administration was an early enthusiast for the NCTC. The president actually created it by executive order in August 2004, four months before Congress enacted it. Moreover, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s recruitment of Zelikow signaled that State would be committed to seeing that NCTC functioned as envisioned. This called for bifurcating the report: State would do what it was minimally required to do in making the report to Congress, but the data now belonged to the NCTC, and it would be primarily responsible for how that would be released.

Why couldn’t they get their act together last week? The best explanation appears to be a web of transition. Although the NCTC established in the president’s executive order was essentially the same NCTC codified by the intelligence reform bill, there was a significant chain-of-command difference. Under the former, NCTC reported to the CIA director; under the latter, it reports to the newly created Director of National Intelligence (DNI) — another recommendation of the 9/11 Commission. Unfortunately, although John Negroponte’s nomination to fill that post has long been known, there was no DNI until April 21 when he was finally confirmed and sworn in.