EDITORIAL
9/11 Commission's difficult undertaking

"We all understood bin Laden's attempt to strike the homeland," CIA Director George Tenant told the 9/11 Commission this week. "But we never translated this knowledge into an effective defense of the country."

This painfully instrospective statement and many like it from other officials in the American intelligence and law enforcement community hint at the real difficulty that faces the commission.

Tenet told the commission that his agency had provided "clear and direct" intelligence about the larger danger posed by al-Qaida before 9/11. "Warning was well understood," he said, "even if the timing and method of attacks was not."

One danger of the commission's undertaking is the tendency to see the few known hints of what al-Qaida was up to, by the light of 20-20 hindsight, as obvious signals.

That would be unfair.

Still, the art of intelligence assessment is that moment of intuitive inspiration when those few bits of chatter present a clear pattern. "Aha." If nothing else, we can hope that the commission's work will clarify how, in the future, we can more efficiently get to that "Aha" moment.

When to act

What the commission must attempt to assess is how much actionable intelligence an Oval Office should need before it can be expected to "envision" a threat and a policy to thwart it.

What worries us is the possibility the commission may develop unrealistic expectations of the intelligence community, and then attempt to reorganize it in pursuit of those unrealistic expections.

A Republican member of the panel, John F. Lehman, who was Navy secretary in the Reagan administration, said the commission's report on the CIA was a "damning evaluation of a system that is broken, that doesn't function."

The report itself suggests the need for an overhaul of the CIA, possibly through the creation of a Cabinet-level post for a national intelligence director who would control the budget of the CIA and other intelligence agencies. The commission also has suggested stripping domestic intelligence activities from the FBI.

Don't overreact

But the commission must pay attention to the impassioned pleas of Tenant and FBI Director Robert Mueller, who counseled against overreaction.

"Most profoundly," Tenant told the commission, "we lacked a government-wide capability to integrate foreign and domestic knowledge, data operations and analysis. Warning is not good enough without the structure to put it into action."

But in August 2001, Tenet was presented with a briefing paper labeled "Islamic Extremist Learns to Fly" about the FBI's arrest days earlier of Zacarias Moussaoui, a French-born Islamic extremist who was taken into custody in Minnesota in August 2001 after arousing the suspicions of his flight-school instructors.

Tenant sat on this information, the commission said Wednesday.

What structural changes can compensate for a lack of imagination and initiative on the part of people at the very apex of American government?