Allowing criminal prosecutors to work alongside foreign intelligence experts under a single authority is a critical new weapon in the government’s “war on terror,” according to the first head of a new division of the Justice Department.
The National Security Division will bring together the department’s national security, counterterrorism, counterintelligence and foreign intelligence functions. Prosecutors from the Justice Department’s criminal division will work with the intelligence attorneys of the Office of Intelligence Policy and Review, the office responsible for filing applications for wire tap and searches under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
The division puts criminal prosecutors in the same room with national security legal experts, Wainstein said.
“You have two perspectives looking at an investigation and that is critical,” he said. Wainstein, the former U.S. attorney general for the District of Columbia who grew up in Alexandria, was confirmed to the job seven weeks ago.
The reorganization is part of the government’s response to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, in which many barriers between the FBI, CIA and the Department of Defense were knocked down, Wainstein said. Authorities now can answer national security threats more effectively and with less red tape, he said.
One basic change: Criminal and intelligence investigations of the same person will use the same case numbers instead of separate numbers as in the past, Wainstein said. The office must weigh whether to make an arrest or to continue to milk the investigation for intelligence.
“It’s a delicate balance,” he said.
The division was created at the recommendation of the Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission and authorized by the renewal of the USA Patriot Act.
The new division also works closely with the Defense Department on counterterrorism and counterintelligence investigations and prosecutions including those held at Guantanamo and subject to military commissions. Wainstein acts as a liaison to John Negroponte, and nation’s first director of national intelligence.
