The Obama White House announced today that their pick as the next director of the National Counterterrorism Center is going to be Matthew G. Olsen, a lawyer out of the Department of Justice and the NSA’s general counsel.
He'll be replacing Michael Leiter, a Bush-appointed former Navy fighter pilot who has led the center for 4 ½ years and played a crucial and vital part in helping to find Osama bin-Laden..which might just be why he's 'resigning' suddenly. No sense having someone else around to share the credit for bagginf bin-Laden with an election coming up, right?
The National Counterterrorism Center is essentially a sort of super spy agency that's under the Director of National Intelligence's office. It was established by President George W. Bush in 2004 and draws experts from places like the CIA, the FBI and the Pentagon to track terrorist threats, collate information and analyze data. It has access to the CIA and FBI databases and also houses the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE) database.
As such, you would think that the most logical person to head this agency would be an intelligence professional with a solid knowledge of tradecraft and analyzing intel. In short, a professional Spook, someone like William Casey.
What we have instead with Mr. Olsen is someone whose background is almost entirely academic and legal. His chief claim to fame thus far was to head something called Guantanamo Review Task Force, a legal group established by executive order of President Obama when he still had fantasies of closing down the detainee center at Guantamano Bay. It's express purpose was to determine which Guantánamo detainees could be transferred to US mainland prisons or released, which could be prosecuted in civilian courts for crimes they might have committed, and to recommend other recommending other possibilities to dispose of the detainees and get them out of Guantamano.
As we now know, that particular mission turned into an absolute farce, with a significant number of detainees being released to their home countries and a number of those going right back to waging war against the US. It was such an abysmal failure that President Obama eventually went back to the Bush Administration policy of military tribunals and keeping Club Gitmo open for business.
That isn't Matthew Olsen's fault, considering the guidelines he was given by his direct boss, Attorney General Eric Holder and by President Obama.But it is indicative of his approach and his background, which is legal and bureaucratic rather than grounded in professional knowledge of the Intelligence trade.
This appears to be a disease in Washington these days. The Administration surrounds itself with lawyers and academics rather than people with real world experience in the matters they're supposed to be in charge of. Leon Panetta's tenure as head of the CIA and now as Secretary of Defense is another example of this illness at work.
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