The United States Government is trying to find a way to paint the big picture of terrorist threats but is having trouble choosing the right canvas.

It recently created a new organization to help America's most important counter-terrorists share information with each other and the country. The Terrorist Threat Integration Center opened for business inside the Central Intelligence Agency complex in Langley, Va. Its major task: Get the Defense Department, Homeland Security Department, the FBI Counter-terrorism Division, and the intelligence community's Counter-terrorist Center to talk to each other and work together.

Introduced by President George Bush during his 2003 State of the Union Address, the new Threat Center was formed in consultation with the directors of Central Intelligence and the FBI, the Attorney General, and the secretaries of Homeland Security and Defense. The Threat Center's primary function is to compile a top-secret report known as the Daily Threat Matrix, which is used to help the administration assess potential terrorist attacks.

The Washington Post reported May 1 that the Threat Center would not collect its own intelligence or manage counterterrorism cases. Those tasks will remain with the FBI and Joint Terrorism Task Forces around the country. The Homeland Security Dept. will continue to work with the FBI to ensure that threat information, including information produced by the Threat Center, is disseminated to the public, private industry, and state and local governments.

Although the Threat Center has the administration's endorsement, several members of Congress have been critical of the new organization's structure and purpose. Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.), senior Democrat on the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, has written letters to the president, asking him to reconsider the center's formation outside the Homeland Security Dept. Lieberman has also criticized the Threat Center's Langley location and command structure.

Likewise, Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.), a presidential hopeful, says he believes the Threat Center doesn't go far enough. Edwards has proposed legislation that would establish a Homeland Intelligence Agency. Unlike the Threat Center, it would take away the intelligence-gathering role from the FBI. "The FBI is structurally incapable of reforming itself," says an Edwards spokesman. "The FBI's role is finding and catching criminals."

Others worry that the administration hastily created the Threat Center without proper consideration of privacy and civil liberties. "The Department of Homeland security was built carefully by Congress with built-in protections, but the new center was not," says Lara Flint, staff counsel for the Center for Democracy and Technology, a Washington, DC, Internet public policy organization. Such protections taken by the Homeland Security Dept. included hiring personnel responsible for examining the impact that homeland security policies could have on privacy and civil liberties.

But Washington's debate over who gets to ride in the front seat doesn't take into account that the car has no gas. Emergency responders favor any approach that will help the government do a better job of watching out for national security threats. "As the antiterrorism movement has grown, several entities have formed with no way to integrate them," says Bill May, director of the National Emergency Response and Rescue Training Center (NERRTC). "We need a conduit to get the right information to the right place."

The Justice Dept. formed NERRTC in 1998 to help train local and state police, fire and emergency workers to respond to terrorist threats. Five years later, May hasn't seen a lot of improvement in the way information is sent from the federal government to the local level. "We don't have a sophisticated warning system operating throughout the country," he says. "For example, people still wonder what exactly an orange alert means. These warnings are issued without any clear-cut examples of what people should be looking for."

Edwards agrees. In a speech delivered last December to the Brookings Institution, he said, "The new color-coded scheme from the administration has proven more confusing than helpful to many Americans."

May's frustration is shared by some of the emergency managers he trains. "When the threat level moves to orange, it's a challenge to explain to our people how to react," says Ken Olson, emergency management coordinator for Lubbock, Texas, a town of 200,000 people. "We have to interpret that information for our situation."

Olson's response is to use his network of contacts throughout state and local law enforcement to better understand any emergency situation. He's also tapped into the Internet through InfraGard, a Web site and notification service maintained by businesses nationwide as well as the FBI. InfraGard was first turned on in 1996 and continues to provide its subscribers with information about threats - both physical and cyber. "If you want information, it's out there," says Olson, Lubbock's emergency management coordinator for the past five years. "The challenge for people in my position is finding the pertinent information."

JoAnne Moreau agrees that the best way to prepare for an emergency, terrorist or otherwise, is to keep her ear to the ground. Moreau, director of the East Baton Rouge Parish Office of Emergency Preparedness for the past decade, gets her information from a variety of local, state and national law enforcement sources. East Baton Rouge has 417,000 residents, 18 chemical facilities and the fourth largest port in the country. "You go to the government Web site and check it every day," she says. "We get most of our information from Fox or CNN."

The Threat Center begins life with a staff of 60 and is expected to grow to 300 government employees, eventually moving to a new facility where it will be joined by the DCI's Counterterrorist Center and the FBI's Counterterrorism Division.

Lieberman, in a series of letters to President Bush and Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, said the central problem in locating the Threat Center under the CIA is that the "cultural and institutional rivalries between the CIA and FBI, exposed after the September 11 attacks, will remain in place." The senator said he is concerned that the Threat Center will be isolated from daily homeland security efforts at the local, state and federal levels, and that it won't be accountable to Ridge, the nation's top ranking homeland security official.

Terrorist Threat Integration Center director John Brennan will report directly to CIA director George Tenet, while FBI employees working there will remain under the authority of FBI director Robert Mueller. Brennan, a 23-year CIA veteran, has held a variety of senior positions in the Agency's Directorate of Intelligence and the Directorate of Operations, including terrorism analyst for the DCI's Counterterrorist Center from 1990 to 1992 and White House daily intelligence briefer in 1994 and 1995.

Edwards says he is uncomfortable with the close ties between the new Threat Center and the FBI, which he says shouldn't be in the intelligence business. Edwards has proposed an entirely different approach. He has sponsored legislation that would create a Homeland Intelligence Agency that would collect foreign intelligence inside the United States, then analyze it and get it to the policymakers or first responders.

Last December, Edwards told a Brookings Institution audience, "Within the next year, we ought to be able to do two things. First, guarantee that relevant, detailed, and specific information about immediate threats gets to the local level. To make that easier, we should grant high-level security clearances to at least one top officer in police departments across the country so they can receive classified information.

"Second," Edwards said, "we need to link all of the federal watch lists, as well as appropriate state and local databases, in a national terrorism information network that key local officials and entities like airlines can access at appropriate levels."

At the state and local levels, May says he has no specific knowledge of how the Threat Center or the proposed Homeland Intelligence Agency will work. Still, he supports the sentiments they represent. "I wouldn't think of conducting an operation in the military without intelligence on my enemy," says May, a Vietnam veteran who served in the Army for 30 years and retired a colonel.

May uses his military training to remain vigilant. "As time passes, a particular catastrophic event becomes less important to some people," he says. Since Sept. 11, 2001, Americans have a new enemy whose objectives and capabilities must be understood, May says. "This enemy is patient and plans well," he says. "Just look at how much time elapsed between attacks on the World Trade Center."