Northwest Airlines flight 253, the target of an attempted terrorist bombing, sits on the runway in Detroit on December 25, 2009. Intel agencies' internal turf wars

American intelligence agencies have been blamed for failing in their mission to protect the country when they missed signals that could have nabbed the Christmas Day airplane bomber suspect. Now the nation’s spy chiefs are headed to Capitol Hill with another mission: Blame someone else.

“You’ve got an all-out war in the intelligence community, and the all-out war is not against Al Qaeda; it’s against each other,” said one House Intelligence Committee member.


“In times like this, the intelligence community starts using the tactics against each other that they should be using against our enemies,” said New York Rep. Peter King, the top Republican on the Homeland Security Committee.

The turf wars have been going on behind the scenes for weeks, but Wednesday three Senate committees will dig in with the first public hearings on the Northwest Airlines bombing plot, with several top officials testifying, including Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and FBI Director Robert Mueller.

Democrats can count on Republicans for sharp attacks, starting with the Judiciary Committee Wednesday morning.

“In order to have dots to connect in the first place, we must fully equip our military and security agents with the tools they need. Unfortunately, the Obama administration has been stripping these tools away,” said Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee. “They have given terrorists Miranda rights instead of tough interrogations and have shipped foreign war criminals to American communities for civilian trial.”

And when the House Homeland Security Committee starts its own investigation next week, President Barack Obama’s counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, will take some heat from Republicans.

Democrats will push back. “A one-size-fits-all approach is not necessarily the right way to react to such an incident,” a Democratic Senate aide said. At the hearings, Democrats will emphasize “the need for a thoughtful — not just reflexive — approach to addressing these questions,” the aide said.

“The White House is trying to blame everyone. Brennan’s the guy that’s supposed to be coordinating everything, but the White House itself is trying to finger other people,” King said.

King and other lawmakers briefed on intelligence issues said there has been a three-way turf war among Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair, CIA Director Leon Panetta and National Counterterrorism Center Director Michael Leiter. All three will be on Capitol Hill to testify Wednesday — and the White House is hoping they contain their infighting behind the scenes. Brennan will brief lawmakers separately.

“We will ask Adm. Blair and Director Leiter why the intelligence community was unable to bring together pieces of intelligence held by various agencies to detect this plot and whether the DNI and NCTC have the authority to integrate the intelligence community into a single, integrated enterprise,” Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Joe Lieberman said in a statement.

Leiter’s NCTC, an agency without the institutional clout of the CIA, is in the cross hairs of congressional investigators.

“Until Dec. 25, everybody would have said it was the big success of the Intelligence Reform Act — the big success is now kind of wilted. They, I suspect, will be the big punching bag,” said a terrorism expert who works regularly with lawmakers on policy issues.

The stakes in these hearings are high, and the Democrats have to walk a fine line between being tough investigators on the terror plot and not doing too much political damage to their president.

“Any attack, and this administration is finished. They’re not going to get reelected. Congress needs to start thinking about this, too. If there is a big attack, it’s not going to be restricted to the president,” the terrorism expert said.

Getting the personalities in line before the spy chiefs talk in public has been a top priority for the White House.

“There is a very heavy burden on the president to be very clear about who’s in charge in the intelligence community. The president’s leadership here is crucial and has to be continuous. If it is not, you run the risk of mission confusion and a decrease in effectiveness,” said former Rep. Lee Hamilton, vice chairman of the 9/11 Commission.

King has been particularly critical of Brennan, complaining that the White House cut off all communication with Congress on Christmas night, that he has yet to receive any information and that the silence was at Brennan’s request. Privately, Democrats complained that King went on TV quickly after the attempted bombing, before lawmakers had been briefed.

Adam Comis, spokesman for House Homeland Security Chairman Bennie Thompson, emphasized that Brennan had been available to lawmakers, briefing House committees and members last week.

Leiter and Brennan won’t be the only ones on trial. Napolitano — who appeared on TV the Sunday after Christmas and said “the system worked” — will get hammered by Republicans.

King said he wants to know what the Homeland Security Department’s role is. “Napolitano was slow getting out of the gate and then was not a major player as things went along, so I want to know what she envisions the role of the [department] to be,” King said.

One scapegoat unlikely to take much heat, despite some culpability: Congress itself, which passed the 2004 law that set up the new intelligence bureaucracy.

“The vast majority of blame for Dec. 25 is with the new alphabet soup agencies, not the old ones. And how does that look for Congress? They supposedly fixed all of this, solved it. They’re not going to say, ‘Well, what we did was only a dog’s breakfast or halfway done.’ They’re going to deflect blame off themselves,” the terrorism expert said.