Laws Still Making it Difficult to Fight War Against Terror

NaperSun.com

Editor's note: Naperville Police Chief David Dial's column, which normally is published every other Monday, was inadvertently omitted this Monday. It is being published here now, and will return to its normal position Aug. 25 on Page 2.

In 1996, Los Angeles County Sheriff's Detective Larry Richards helped to create the Los Angeles County Terrorism Early Warning Group. The TEW Group was designed to integrate a multi-disciplinary (police, fire and health) network made up of local, state and federal agencies for sharing intelligence about terrorist threats. The former Director of Homeland Security, Tom Ridge, has since recognized the TEW Group as a national model for fusion centers.

The terrorist attacks of 2001 represented exactly the kind of action the TEW Group was created to prevent. The 9/11 Commission attributed our failure to prevent the attacks to a breakdown in the sharing of intelligence, resulting from a failure of management, a failure of policy, a failure of capability and a failure of imagination.

Now, we are finding that national level documents and executive orders stating the need to share, collaborate and coordinate homeland security intelligence within the national, state and local context have become juxtaposed with some of the realities of actually doing it.

This became evident in 2006 when it was learned that a Marine gunnery sergeant gave classified military information to Detective Richards who, in addition to being a detective on the sheriff's department, was also a colonel in the Marine Corps Reserve.

The gunnery sergeant stated that he was recruited by Detective Richards to collect the classified documents and pass them on to the TEW Group.

During a court-martial hearing, the gunnery sergeant admitted releasing the classified documents to two Los Angeles law enforcement officials, including Detective Richards. Although he received no personal gain for the release of the documents and said he did so out of patriotism, he was given a 26-month prison sentence for his conduct.

Last month it was announced that, because of a widening probe of this matter, two additional Marine Corps reservists were called back to Camp Pendleton for allegedly sharing secret files with the TEW Group. Both of them are being charged with dereliction of duty and several orders violations.

Additionally, internal investigations are ongoing in both the police and sheriff's departments in Los Angeles.

This entire situation has turned into an intelligence-sharing nightmare. It is clear that laws were broken. It is also clear that we need to find a way to enable information exchange between first responders and our military in matters of national security.

Marine Colonel and a long-time TEW Group participant G. I. Wilson has described this incident as "a huge indictment of the stove-piped systems we continue to propagate after wasting billions of dollars (in intelligence). It kind of makes you wonder who the bad guys are."

The public should not be shocked after the terrorist attack on America to learn that critical information was not shared.