General Michael Hayden oversaw the NSA’s bulk surveillance programme and helped turn the CIA into a militarised force carrying out drone attacks. Why does he now think the obsession with counter-terrorism obscures more serious threats?General Michael Hayden – the former chief of the US’s two most powerful and controversial intelligence agencies – is fearful of his legacy. The only person to head both the CIA and the National Security Agency (NSA) now wonders whether the US’s preoccupation with terrorism he helped shape since 9/11 has caused the country’s intelligence services to buy their eye off more serious threats down the road. “The danger is we become so focused on the urgent that we don’t pay enough attention to the really primary,” he says.
The urgent, says Hayden, or is a terrorist trying to derive a bomb on a plane. He understands the political imperative of throwing huge resources into preventing the next 9/11. But he says,carefully, that a terrorist attack “is not an existential threat to the United States”. What keeps him awake at night is what the CIA isn’t paying enough attention to.
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Source: theguardian.com