Navy Yard Shooter's Background Check: Who Saw It Last?

The latest effort to point the accusing finger of blame at the contractor performing the background investigation of Washington Navy Yard shooter Aaron Alexis misses a critical point. The quality of any background investigation is no better than what the recipient of the data does with this information. And the ultimate decider using such an investigation to grant or withhold a security clearance is a government employee, not a contractor. This is an undelegable duty that government employees reserve for themselves, on the oft-touted and logically defended argument that there are some duties not to be passed on to the private sector.

Not that this argument is infallible. After all, when it comes to most work in the national security space, the people doing the heavy lifting behind the scenes come from the same gene pool and are more alike than they are different. One day they may be career government employees. The next day they may be contractors. In either case, adjudicators who review discrepant data surfaced by background checks to make a determination on whether to grant a security clearance do not need a corporate paycheck to make a mistake. Inertia, bureaucracy, and insufficient scrutiny surely do not bypass government offices to infect only the private sector. Indeed, private companies like background investigation firms have the wherewithal to inoculate themselves at least somewhat against bureaucratic ineptitude. They can fire incompetents. Government counterparts only sigh wistfully when daydreaming of imposing such involuntary career events in their work force.

Nevertheless, some mistakes and systemic failures infect the public and private sectors with equal regularity. One such instance is a chronic failure to do something about aberrant behavior on two fronts. One front is to simply use the tools available for what they were intended. A security clearance is not supposed to be a right or entitlement. It is and should be something for which one qualifies. Instability, insubordination, and multiple encounters with police associated with threatening behavior supply ample justification for withholding or at least suspending a security clearance. And while a security focal point in the private sector may have a hand in reporting such data to the government, the one responsible for doing something remains a government employee. The responsibility does not stop there.

This is the second front. One could argue that everyone working with or routinely encountering Alexis who witnessed his troubling behavior had some kind of obligation to do something, but what? A co-worker, whether a Navy employee or contractor could be obliged to approach management or security to report concerns about a potential threat to the workplace. Failure analysis will likely unearth stories of warning signs neglected or unaddressed by those with the power to intervene. What will the accused fall back on to excuse their failure to act?

Privacy. Confidentiality of medical information or personnel data. Individual employee rights. Fear of lawsuits arising from wrongful discharge or from allegations of discrimination. There is a common thread tying all such excuses. It is the loss of perspective which follows when organizations focus on individual rights at the expense of the more basic interests of the larger employee population.

Sure, no individual should be unfairly treated by being denied a clearance or fired from a job without good reason. However, in the knee-jerk emphasis of fairness and liability avoidance, organizations often lose sight of the larger consequences. And so, letting Alexis keep his security clearance, sweeping his threatening behavior under the rug of privacy or employee rights, and passing the buck for his next employer to handle what appeared to be chronic personal problems that were only getting worse -- all this becomes the default at work. And this is why it is ethically unsupportable to point the accusing finger of blame at a single contractor. Lots of fingers remain for pointing elsewhere.

-- Nick Catrantzos

"Won't listen? Then feel" Foreign Policy

I wrote these notes before Russia's Putin commandeered the world's stage about Syria. The press of other matters delayed posting, but my friend and colleague, Mark, read what follows and said it reminded him of his own father's approach to deterring undesired activity. If you won't listen, you will just have to feel consequences. No protracted debates. No soapbox sermons. Thanks for a more memorable subject line than something with the word lessons in it, Mark.

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Ah, the tumultuous Middle East, where villains savage their own rival tribes and issue death threats with all the gusto of a thespian preening for a debut on Broadway. How does one put the noise into context? Consider some events from recent history:

Hostile Talk

- During the Six-Day War, the Egyptian Air Force was proudly announcing air superiority of its fighter aces as Israel was neutering Egyptian air power.
- Circa 1986, as tensions between Libya and the U.S. spiked after a Libyan-sponsored bombing of U.S. servicemen in a nightclub outside an American military base, Qaddafi announced a "line of death" which, if crossed, would mean complete devastation for American forces. The latter bombed Qaddafi into silence, after narrowly missing him in an air strike that killed his son and obliterated any subsequent talk of lines of death.

Meaningful Action

- Earlier this year, after catching Syria in the act of arming Hezbollah with weapons whose target would only be Israel, Israel bombed weapons caches in Syria without fanfare or hesitation. Syria expressed outrage but knew better than to attack Israel in retaliation. Nor did war rhetoric follow from either side.
- In the days when kidnappings of journalists and diplomats were common fears in Beirut, legend has it that one terrorist group tried its hand with abducting a Soviet official. The Russians, as the story goes, did not engage in media pleas for release or hostage negotiations. Instead, they found the first relative traceable to the instigator, his nephew, and sent the nephew's private parts in a package to the instigator. The Soviet hostage was then released without fanfare or rhetorical exchanges in the press.

Lessons

Deterrence still works, but perhaps in inverse ratio to proclamation and palaver. Action still speaks louder than words, and sometimes loudest when uncluttered with words. In the foregoing cases of the Israelis and Russians, one may only wonder if the reaction by those on the receiving end was not something like, "Well, no one ever explained it that way to us before."

Even the French get this, which is why they see no double standard in calling us cowboys if we move without coalitions, United Nations' blessings, and favorable press. Meanwhile, whenever France perceives a threat to its interests in Congo, Algeria, or Mali, the French definition of nanosecond becomes the degree of hesitation they experience in worrying about such imprimaturs before sending in their expeditionary forces. And those forces go in, gloves off, to do a job -- not to send a message.

-- Nick Catrantzos