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President Bush Tuesday added another layer to the government's growing list of agencies and organizations charged with fielding information on suspected terrorists.

In a press briefing, senior administration officials said the new Terrorist Screening Center (TSC), established at Bush's order, would ensure that government investigators, airline passenger screeners and other agents work from "the same unified, comprehensive set of anti-terrorist information."

The organization is envisioned as a delivery center for terrorist intelligence that is collected by other agencies, most notably the FBI and the CIA. Those agencies have created the Terrorist Threat Integration Center (TTIC), which is responsible for collecting and analyzing terrorism-related intelligence from around the world.

Officials said that the new screening center will not collect information, but rather will disseminate it to various government personnel, including state and local law enforcement agencies and airline passenger screeners.

"Right now, there are several major watch lists and related systems" that track names of suspected terrorists and details about their activities, Attorney General John Ashcroft said in a statement. "The Terrorist Screening Center will provide 'one-stop shopping' so that every federal anti-terrorist screener is working off the same page - whether it's an airport screener, an embassy official issuing visas overseas or an FBI agent on the street."

The Homeland Security Department, according to the law that created it, was supposed to integrate dozens of terrorists watch lists into a single repository. Senior officials had promised the lists would be collected 100 days after the department opened its doors last spring, but that hasn't happened.

The Terrorist Screening Center, however, now will serve as that single collection point for the watch lists, and the FBI, not Homeland Security, will administer it. According to a statement issued by Homeland Security, the FBI was tapped as the lead agency because of its "technical experience in watch list integration."

Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the FBI has been upgrading its information technology systems, which were so antiquated that many agents didn't have access to e-mail or the Internet. While the FBI has helped to consolidate some watch lists, the task of integrating all of them has remained incomplete.

In a statement, FBI Director Robert Mueller sought to distinguish the screening center from other recently created counterterrorism entities, including TTIC and Homeland Security's Information Assurance and Infrastructure Protection division, which experts had thought would become the government's terrorism intelligence hub.

"What's different about the TSC is the ability to make . . . information available in real time, constantly updated, 24 hours a day and across the board," Mueller said. The FBI has been running a round-the-clock terrorism watch center, but the new center will give callers access to "on-call experts who can support them in taking immediate and appropriate action to stop terrorists and prevent attacks at any hour of the day or night."

An April General Accounting Office report criticized the government's approach to creating watch lists, calling it "diffuse and nonstandard," largely because the lists were developed by different agencies based on varying needs and legal and technological constraints.

The report recommended that the Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge "consolidate and standardize the federal government's watch list structures and policies."

The TSC will receive "the vast majority" of information from TTIC after officials there have assembled and analyzed it, according to a Homeland Security fact sheet. Also, the FBI will provide TSC with intelligence only about domestic terrorism "having no connection to international terrorist actives," the fact sheet said. "The TSC will consolidate this information into an unclassified terrorist screening database and make the database accessible to queries for federal, state and local agencies for a variety of screening purposes."

Homeland Security officials emphasized that the center will have "no independent authority to conduct intelligence collection or other operations" on U.S. citizens, and that it will only receive information legally gathered by the FBI and CIA.

The TSC will be phased in during the coming weeks and will be operational by Dec. 1, Homeland Security officials said. The center will be housed at an FBI facility in Arlington, Va.

COMMENTS

• Let's do a good thing and create and office to consolidate and track terrorism information. This part is good, but I have to question why the federal government leaders continue to put all of their eggs in one basket by placing all of these offices in the Washington D.C. metropolitan area. Then on top of that they publish the information on the location so it is trackable to any terrorist who may want to know. I just want to tell our leaders that there are other cities in this country that can do very good work and may actually even provide a better strategic location in the event of another terrorist attack. Does anyone remember that there were four planes on September 11th and two were targeted at New York City and two at Washington D.C.? To me this is pretty simple logic to say maybe our Government should not consolidate everything in the same area and as a federal worker it makes the idea of living in the Washington D.C. metropolitan area that much more undesirable. So this message is to let you leaders know that we have some great federal workers in other American cities and we are ready and willing to work hard, so please do not continue to disregard us when you make such decisions! GovExec.com reader Posted September 17, 2003 7:52 AM