Posted on: Friday, July 23, 2004

EDITORIAL
9/11: What happened, and what we must do

Now that the long-anticipated report from the commission on the Sept. 11 attacks is in our hands, what will we do with it?

Given the dribbled release over the past few months of preliminary staff reports and no shortage of leaks, we find few actual surprises in the final product. Yet the sweeping judgments of the commission in assessing fault for the greatest loss of life during an assault on American soil since the Civil War, resulting in the loss of 3,000 lives, are sobering in the extreme.

Its recommendations to correct the weaknesses, particularly in the intelligence community, that allowed the disaster to occur are daunting.

Much progress has been made in the counterterrorism effort since 9/11. Yet in handing the report to President Bush yesterday, the commission's chairman, Thomas Kean, a Republican, voiced its most crucial finding:

"We are not safe."

Plenty of blame

Looking backward, the commission finds more than enough blame to go around for that terrible day nearly three years ago. The report lists 10 "operational opportunities," four during the Clinton administration and six under Bush, that — possibly but improbably, the report concedes — might have led to foiling the audacious al-Qaida plot in which four commercial airliners were hijacked to be used as weapons of mass destruction.

The report blames both presidents less for negligence than for heedlessness and "a failure of imagination."

The commission found the nation to have been woefully unprepared despite ample — if generally unspecific — warnings of the gravity of the terrorist threat. Bush said yesterday he would have moved heaven and earth — and he was sure President Clinton would have, too — to prevent it if he had had the slightest inkling of what was afoot.

Yet the report makes clear that both Bush — in August 2001 — and Clinton — in 1998 — did receive warning that Osama bin Laden was plotting to use hijacked aircraft in the United States.

Intelligence reform

More important, however, is the commission's conclusion that both presidents were badly served by an intelligence establishment designed for the Cold War instead of the 21st century. The nation will be better served if its leaders focus on the commission's recommendations for intelligence reform instead of pointing fingers for election-year political advantage.

Nevertheless, history will not look kindly, the commission suggests, on the Bush administration's decision to divert the nation from its war on terrorism, with its focus in Afghanistan, to Iraq. The commission supports what many others have concluded: that al-Qaida has colluded in important ways with Iran and Pakistan, but not with Iraq.

This suggests that even after three years, the administration and the nation are still not clear on who the enemy is or how to deal with him.

In fact, with the ouster of Saddam, Tehran may be even less responsive to pressure than before, since one of Iran's chief threats is now out of the picture.

Meanwhile, the Bush administration continues to underestimate Pakistan's part in the terrorist threat, not only for its close connections with the Taliban and al-Qaida, but its role in proliferating nuclear know-how to Libya, Iran and North Korea.

The commission's call for intelligence reform presents crucial opportunities and great challenges. The central recommendation is to consolidate the now-fractured intelligence community, including anti-terrorism aspects of the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, under a single "czar," sitting at Cabinet level.

The commission found that the current office of director of central intelligence, recently vacated by George Tenet, impossibly has to wear three distinct hats: CIA director, top intelligence adviser to the president and nominal head of 14 other intelligence agencies.

We must be wary

There are important reasons to proceed carefully on this recommendation:

• Adding another layer of bureaucracy may not be the best way to cure dysfunction.

• The president needs an objective and apolitical intelligence adviser, not another zealous advocate for policy.

• Creation of a single intelligence spokesman might contribute to, rather than diminish, the phenomenon of "group think," where intelligence officers in a single structure do not challenge one another's assumptions.

Yet the commission's report makes clear the failure of the intelligence establishment to add up to the sum of its parts. Key information that might have foiled the 9/11 plot was trapped between the community's discrete compartments.

Given the release of this report on the eve of the congressional summer recess and then the election, and the fact that intelligence reform is certain to redistribute power in a town whose denizens live for power, there's every reason to fear that intelligence reform will be a back-burner issue for the rest of this year.

Delay, however, should be unthinkable. If the 9/11 commission is correct that an even worse terrorist attack in the United States may well be in the works, then there's not a moment to lose.