It’s still too early to make an assessment about the details of did or did not happen before the horrific attacks on churches and hotels in Sri Lanka on Easter morning. The attacks are still under investigation, and from what we do know right now, a radical Islamist group National Thowheeth Jama’ath is responsible for the attack. We also know that Sri Lankan security services apparently screwed the pooch.

Ten days before the bombings, a top Sri Lankan police official warned the security services that a radical Islamist group was planning suicide attacks against churches, but no action was taken against the group. It was unclear what other precautions, if any, the security agencies had taken in response to the threat warnings.

Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe said on Sunday that neither he nor his cabinet ministers had been informed of the warning, highlighting the power struggle between him and President Maithripala Sirisena, who is also the defense minister. Late last year, the feud led, for a time, to there being two officials claiming to be the rightful prime minister.

It appears that the stovepiping of information and political games led to this particular intelligence failure that resulted in so much death and carnage!

Does it sound familiar to anyone else?

In the 9/11 Commission’s report detailing the myriad of failures that led up to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the Commission specifically zeroed in on failures in information sharing.

We learned of the pervasive problems of managing and sharing information across a large and unwieldy government that had been built in a different era to confront different dangers.

[…]

Each intelligence agency has its own security practices, outgrowths of the Cold War.We certainly understand the reason for these practices. Counterintelligence concerns are still real, even if the old Soviet enemy has been replaced by other spies.

But the security concerns need to be weighed against the costs. Current security requirements nurture overclassification and excessive compartmentation of information among agencies. Each agency’s incentive structure opposes sharing, with risks (criminal, civil, and internal administrative sanctions) but few rewards for sharing information. No one has to pay the long-term costs of over-classifying information, though these costs—even in literal financial terms—are substantial. There are no punishments for not sharing information. Agencies uphold a “need-to-know” culture of information protection rather than promoting a “need-to-share” culture of integration

Anyone who wants some very interesting insights into the battle between law enforcement agencies and the intelligence community leading up to the 9/11 attacks should pick up a book called “The Looming Tower.”

It seems Sri Lankan authorities faced similar problems. The Defense Minister was never informed about the attack plot, even though law enforcement did share the information with security services, who apparently promptly ignored it.

There were some warnings issued as early as April 4, according to the Sri Lankan Health Minister, but once again, the Prime Minister had not been informed, and the lack of cooperation is so pervasive, that when the Prime Minister recently called a security council meeting, panel members refused to attend.

Meanwhile, the letter you see to my left, provided information about the impending attack. According to the New York Times, the April 11 letter “not only named the group believed to be planning an attack, National Thowheeth Jama’ath, but also named individual members, and even gave addresses where they could be found.”

The intelligence failure resulted in nearly 300 dead, hundreds more injured, and a world horrified once again about how this could have happened.

In a world where ISIS amir Abu-Du’a last year continued to encourage followers to attack the West, where ISIS affiliates like al-Shabaab launch attacks against hotels, where ISIS affiliates in the Philippines bomb churches, and where a resurgent, more determined al-Qa’ida plots against the West, it’s difficult to believe that any security service would ignore credible warnings from law enforcement.

But they did, and now hundreds are dead and injured.

I haven’t seen anything suggesting links between National Thowheeth Jama’ath and ISIS or al-Qa’ida, but as one security expert put it, these attacks “look as if they came right out of the ISIS, Al Qaeda, global militant jihadist playbook, as these are attacks fomenting religious hatred by attacking multiple churches on a high religious holiday.” And given that Sri Lanka did have a bunch of ISIS supporters lend a fighting hand in Iraq and Syria, it’s entirely possible that at least some of them returned from the battlefield to wreak havoc at home.

Regardless of whether ISIS, al-Qa’ida, or National Thowheeth Jama’ath conducted these coordinated attacks, the security services had a specific warning and appear to have taken no action thanks to political and inter-service rivalries.

I hold them partially responsible.

Featured photo: St. Anthony’s Shrine, Kochchikade, one of the targets of yesterday’s terrorist attacks. CC BY-SA 4.0