FOCUSED ON 9/11, U.S. IS SEEN TO LAG ON NEW THREATS

By ERIC LIPTON and MATTHEW L. WALD

Published: August 12, 2006

WASHINGTON, Aug. 11 — The Department of Homeland Security has taken significant steps since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks to make it much harder to turn a plane into a flying weapon. But a nearly obsessive focus on the previous attacks may have prevented the federal government from combating new threats effectively, terrorism experts and former agency officials say.

The arrests overseas this week of people accused of planning to use an explosive that would be undetectable at airports illustrates the significant security gaps, they said.

While the department has hardened cockpit doors and set up screening for guns and knives, it has done far too little to protect against plastic and liquid explosives, bombs in air cargo and shoulder-fired missiles, the experts say.

The nation is still at risk from the same “failure of imagination” cited by the 9/11 commission as having contributed to the success of the 2001 attack, several argued.

“They are reactive, not proactive,” said Randall J. Larsen, a retired colonel in the Air Force who is chairman of the military strategy department at the National War College in Washington.

Robert M. Blitzer, who served 26 years in the Federal Bureau of Investigation, including as head of its counterterrorism unit, said the federal government had a serious problem because its personnel today turned over far too quickly.

Mr. Blitzer, now an analyst at ICF International, in Fairfax, Va., said: “They don’t have enough continuity and knowledge to know what they’re up against. Stability is a big thing for identifying trends. It’s not easy to do. Sometimes all you have is just snippets of information.”

Justin P. Oberman, a former senior policy official at the Transportation Security Administration, said the problem was not lack of imagination but limited money available to invest in the technologies needed.

“Too much is weighted toward looking for knives and guns on people coming through the checkpoint and screening every checked bag,” Mr. Oberman, who left the agency last year, said.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, in a news conference Friday, said the department was trying to stay ahead of terrorists.

“We’ve spent about three-quarters of a billion dollars in research on emerging types of technologies in explosives,” Mr. Chertoff said. “And we are constantly monitoring the world for developments that occur in the field of improvised explosive devices, precisely so we can start to work on countermeasures.”

But even at senior levels of the department, there is recognition that this criticism is somewhat fair. “D.H.S. has to be nimble in a way most government agencies don’t, and that has to be baked into our very DNA,” said Michael Jackson, the deputy secretary, in an interview. “I am impatient. I don’t think we have gotten as far as we need to go. We can do more, and we can do better. And we must.”

The vulnerabilities are clear. A failed plot in 1995, incubated in the Philippines, to bomb 12 United States commercial jets flying out of Asia, centered on the use of triacetone triperoxide, or TATP, a liquid explosive that may also have been the weapon of choice of the plotters in England. The Department of Homeland Security has evaluated technology that it says will search an individual bottle for liquid explosives, but it cannot search all the bottles in a suitcase. It also cannot reliably detect chemicals that are not explosive but become so when mixed.

The department is still evaluating technologies for foiling shoulder-fired missiles, a favored tool of rebel groups against military aircraft. One blinds missiles with an infrared laser; another option would be a ground-based antimissile system near airports.

The Transporation Security Administration has the technology to inspect small objects shipped as air cargo, but does not have the capacity to do so uniformly.

Given the long list of possible threats, and the limited budget to buy equipment to defend against them, it is essential not just to look for threats, Mr. Larsen said, but also to evaluate each one.

Mr. Oberman, the former security agency official, said that part of the problem was the mandates imposed on the agency by Congress — like hiring government employees to do checkpoint screening and inspecting every checked bag instead of focusing the inspections on those considered the highest risk. This results in inspection programs that are so costly there is little money available to research into new threats.

When James Loy took over the security agency in 2002, he created a special unit assigned to think like terrorists. “It was all part of staying on the edge,” he said.

But Mr. Loy, who became Homeland Security’s deputy, was in charge of the security agency when it took money that had been set aside for explosive detection research and put it into the hiring of baggage and checkpoint screeners, so that the agency could comply with the

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 “What doesn’t exist yet is a risk management process,” said Penrose C. Albright, a former assistant secretary for science and technology at the Department of Homeland Security. “In the absence of coherent analysis, there’s no way to prevent the system from getting whipsawed. So it’s not surprising that we end up spending a lot of money fighting the last war and not addressing more modern threats.”

Mr. Jackson, the deputy secretary, and Kip Hawley, the current security agency administrator, said they recognized that Homeland Security must constantly adjust its game plan.

The security agency, for example, last year lifted the ban on small knives and scissors, after Mr. Hawley said the department determined that the hardening of cockpit doors and the presence of more air marshals on flights reduced the threat. The time airport screeners had taken up looking for these small items can be spent looking for other threats, like explosives.

The agency is working on a passenger screening machine that can create an X-ray-like image to look for hidden weapons or plastic or liquid explosives. The agency also has “Red Teams” that invent challenges to test the agency’s response.

Mr. Hawley, in an interview Friday, said that airports were the last line of defense in a system in which the first was intelligence, which had worked well this week. Part of being prepared, he said, was what the department did on Wednesday and Thursday, reacting swiftly to intelligence, and literally overnight instituting major changes in screening protocols at all 765 checkpoints nationwide.

But Mr. Jackson, who took over as deputy secretary in 2005, said it was clear that Homeland Security must move more aggressively and quickly to search for new ways to detect explosives.

As a result, he said, he is preparing to announce a restructuring of the department’s Science and Technology division that will sharpen its focus on the most urgent threats, like liquid explosives, that war games might identify.