Law Enforcement After 911 Since September 11,

Law Enforcement After 911

Since September 11, 2001, the United States has faced an unprecedented level of terrorist threat, forcing the U.S. Government to allocate additional resources and energy for combating and preventing terrorism. In the face of every terror threat or attempted terrorist acts against American civilians, many critical observers and media commentators criticize the law enforcement agencies for their inability to successfully combat terrorism. The hypothesis of this paper, however, is that the law enforcement agencies have become better equipped to handle terrorist threats since 9/11 and were able to prevent terrorist attacks against the United States. Statistical data on foiled terrorist plots as well as the new strategies adopted by the FBI, CIA, the Department of Homeland Security and other agencies show that America today is better protected from terrorism than ever before. The increasing level of terrorist threat is due to increasing level of willingness on the part of terrorists to strike at the U.S. rather than the inability of law enforcement agencies to tackle the problem of terrorism.

Before 9/11, the U.S. Government viewed international terrorism as a strictly law-enforcement problem, leaving it to the FBI to handle. The FBI record of combating terrorism was not poor before 9/11. The agency successfully apprehended the 1993 World Trade Center bombers within six days, prevented attacks on New York's most important landmarks by arresting and convicting the "Blind Sheik," sent agents in 1998 to East Africa, where they solved the embassy bombing incidents with limited resources available to them; and sent agents to Yemen in 2000 to determine that al Qaeda was behind the U.S.S. Cole bombing. "During this time," however, "the Justice Department severely and unnecessarily restricted the FBI's ability to share intelligence information, and Congress acted haltingly to properly resource, fund and provide the legal framework for the FBI's counterterrorism program, including new technology required to defend the nation" (Kallstrom, 2010).

After 9/11, the threat of terrorism from al Qaeda and other extremist groups dramatically increased. Despite the Bush Administration's commitment to allocate the needed resources to combat terrorism, the FBI's budget nevertheless was "squeezed." The FBI's request of 1.5 billion in additional funds to improve its counterterrorism measures were cut to $531 million. Attorney General John D. Ashcroft and the White House "cut the FBI's request for items such as computer networking and foreign language intercepts by half, cut a cyber-security request by three quarters and eliminated entirely a request for 'collaborative capabilities' " (Dana, 2004). Despite these restrictions, the FBI adopted a whole set of new approaches after 9/11 to enhance its counterterrorism efforts. For example, the agency's intelligence before 9/11 had no centralized management, no cohesive intelligence cadre, and no cross-program approach. After 9/11, the FBI adopted an enterprise-wide intelligence program, centralized its management, enhanced its ability to fuse, analyze, and share intelligence; began to allow intelligence to drive investigative strategies, and intelligence sharing became the rule, which substantially increased intelligence production.