Army to cut funding for intelligence school?

The Army is set to lose about half of its instructors at its interrogation and counter-intelligence school because it plans to reduce its private contractors’ pay by 50 percent, according to a source who spoke to WorldNetDaily.

The move, said the source – who is familiar with the payment cutbacks as well as the school’s overall function and role – will cripple the Army’s ability to properly train its counter-intelligence personnel at a time when intelligence assets are sorely needed to fight the war on terrorism.

In fact, the source said, the Pentagon is having to recall to active duty linguists and other intelligence-related personnel – some who were completely out of the military – to fill needed voids.

According to the source, the Army plans to reclassify the instructors as individual contractors and set the pay level at half of what it was previously.

“Can you say, ‘intelligence failure’?” said the source, adding that the school was already operating at only two-thirds strength. “Now it’s going to lose half its people. With 10 classes scheduled for this year, imagine the quality of instruction these guys are going to get.”

The source, who said the contractors plan to walk out Jan. 31, added that the school – located at Fort Huachuca, Ariz. – has a history of budget and personnel problems.

Several calls over the past week were made to Fort Huachuca seeking comment, but public relations personnel were unable to obtain official comments from Army spokesmen. Officials at the Pentagon also failed to return calls seeking comment on the development.

The school’s personnel problems are historic, the source said, and are rooted in a new reorganization plan.

According to sources, the Army has only about 500 interrogators, who, together, speak dozens of languages, and it has only slightly more counter-intelligence personnel. As part of Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki’s “lighter, more lethal Army” concept, the interrogation and counter-intelligence, or Intel/CI, divisions are being merged.

Intel/CI personnel are needed to help military and federal law enforcement officials interview suspects, decipher intelligence communications and perform other language-related tasks that, collectively, help form the basis for U.S. intelligence efforts.

At all times Intel/CI capabilities are vital, but during wartime they become crucial.

“To teach interrogation and debriefing, you have to do it one on one,” the source told WND. “In real life, you never interrogate more than one prisoner at once.”

The interrogation and counter-intelligence school, however, has been plagued with chronic instructor shortages. With too few instructors, “you can either run more than two interrogations per day – which would stretch into the night” and eventually lead to “instructor burn-out,” or “you have students in class without instructors,” the source said. “Either way it starts degrading the quality of training.”

In an effort to make up for the Army’s chronic instructor shortages, some civilian contractors were hired. But if the contractors walk, the source said, the school “will go from two-thirds strength to about half strength.”

The school is supposed to have 30 instructors, the source continued, but is currently staffed with 12 military and 10 civilian personnel.

“The bottom line,” the source said, “is the school doesn’t have enough people to handle the current load and it’s losing half the people it has. And the way the military is, no one is going to say, ‘We can’t do the job,’ because they’d get canned.”

The result will be “highly untrained … intelligence personnel that have to go out into the world and, supposedly, protect our country.”

“What astounds me is that we can write off crashing a $50 million plane or lob tons of $1.2 million missiles without batting an eyelash, but funding contractors equates to pulling teeth and is regularly denied,” the source said.

For a number of reasons, the U.S. government and its military have been wrestling with poor intelligence and counter-intelligence capabilities for years.

In 1999, during the Clinton administration, CIA Director George Tenet issued a secret document outlining American intelligence weaknesses and a plan to improve the nation’s intelligence capabilities.

UPI reported that one of Tenet’s top concerns was getting intelligence databases in shape for the military’s day-to-day use, rather than updating them when a major crisis hits.

“To support these operations on a more-or-less continuous basis, the intelligence community must develop accurate and current databases – not just post-warning surge,” Tenet wrote in his report, called, “Strategic Intent for the United States Intelligence Community.”

In a rare and frank critique, Tenet wrote that “some (recipients of the intelligence product) say that they get more out of the open press than from our intelligence reporting. …”

The CIA director said the U.S. intelligence community’s traditional sources and methods “no longer equip it to meet the demands of a new world order where terrorists and transnational groups pose as great a threat as hostile nations, according to the secret document,” UPI reported, quoting from the document.

“Traditional sources and methods will be of limited use in penetrating terrorist cells, providing evidence of biological or chemical weapons programs, and giving precise indication and warning of impending crises in countries where non-state actors are as influential as the government,” said Tenet’s report.

The lack of human-based intelligence has plagued U.S. military and intelligence planners for most of the 1990s, other experts said.

“One possible contributing factor to this failure of the intelligence and security system could be the lack of resources the U.S. has devoted to human intelligence (HUMINT) capabilities throughout the past decade,” said Jane’s Defense Weekly – ironically in a Sept. 11 story, the day terrorists hijacked a number of American commercial jets and flew them into buildings in New York City and Washington, D.C.

“While national technical means continued to receive high levels of funding for surveillance satellites, signals intelligence flights and other eavesdropping technologies, human-based intelligence capabilities have withered,” the report said.

“Areas such as analysis, linguist skills, cultivation of agent networks and ‘tradecraft’ were all of paramount importance during the Cold War, particularly before the advent of space-based intelligence assets, but have suffered a lack of resources of late,” Jane’s said.

In December, President Bush signed a measure increasing intelligence spending by 8 percent. In response to a 1998 lawsuit by the American Federation of Scientists, the CIA revealed it spent $27.6 billion on intelligence; by 2001, analysts estimated expenditures had risen to around $30 billion.

Prior to the suit, intelligence spending had been kept secret.

The bill puts a new emphasis on the creation of human spy networks to combat terrorism, as well as on increasing the portion of collected data to be analyzed and transformed into useful information.

The law also seeks to revitalize the National Security Agency by shifting its focus from intercepting broadcasts to tapping fiber-optic communication lines, and it pours more money into research and development of technology.