Congress Plans Investigation Into Sept. 11 Intelligence Failures

Leaders of the House and Senate intelligence committees formally announced plans Thursday to conduct a joint inquiry of the intelligence failures surrounding the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

The lawmakers tapped L. Britt Snider, former inspector general at the CIA and onetime aide to CIA Director George J. Tenet, to oversee a staff of investigators who will spend much of the next year, if not longer, investigating what went wrong and why.

Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said that the bicameral arrangement is unprecedented and that the scope of the inquiry will be extensive, with plans to examine the intelligence community’s response to terrorist threats dating back to the 1980s.

The joint committee will spend the next few months gathering documents from agencies and testimony from intelligence officials, with public hearings possible as early as April, Graham said.

“The purpose of this inquiry is to ascertain why the intelligence community did not learn of the Sept. 11 attacks in advance,” Graham said. “We owe this to the 3,000 who died, their families and the rest of America.”

The announcement marks the official opening of an inquiry that lawmakers began discussing almost immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks but were reluctant to begin in the midst of the war in Afghanistan.

Snider, who retired from the CIA last year, is a veteran of intelligence investigations dating back to the landmark Church Committee hearings in the 1970s that probed CIA spying on American citizens.

Critics complained that Snider is too close to Tenet to be objective. Snider previously served as special counsel to Tenet at the CIA and was general counsel to the Senate Intelligence Committee when Tenet was its staff director in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Snider’s selection “sets the stage for a whitewash,” warned the Center for Security Policy, a right-wing organization run by Frank J. Gaffney, a Pentagon official during the Reagan administration.

Sen. Richard C. Shelby of Alabama, the ranking Republican on the intelligence committee, said he and others had raised questions about Snider’s selection but ultimately agreed with his appointment.

The investigation was announced by the ranking members of the intelligence panels in both chambers, including Graham and Shelby in the Senate and Reps. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.) and Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) in the House.

Though Sept. 11 will be the focus of the investigation, lawmakers said they plan to examine the intelligence community’s anti-terrorism efforts dating back to 1985, when the CIA created its counter-terrorism center.

Since then, the United States has been the target of a series of deadly terrorist attacks carried out by Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda organization, including bombings of the World Trade Center in 1993, U.S. embassies in East Africa in 1998 and the destroyer Cole in Yemen in 2000.

The White House has voiced concern in recent weeks that the probe could become a distraction for intelligence officials at a time when they are managing a global effort to combat terrorism. But Graham and Goss said that the Bush administration has pledged full cooperation with the inquiry and that there are no constraints on its scope or direction.

The basic components of the joint committee are only beginning to take shape. Graham and Goss recently requested $2.6 million in funding, enough to pay for roughly 24 staff members through the beginning of next year.

Aside from naming Snider, lawmakers said they have made no other hires, let alone begun drafting requests for evidence or plotting out schedules for hearings.

Graham said the committee will seek to hold its hearings in public when possible but acknowledged that many will have to be conducted in closed session and that the panel expects to issue classified and unclassified versions of its final report.

Some procedural details remain unresolved, including how Graham and Goss--Florida lawmakers from opposing parties--will divide their duties as co-chairmen.

In Snider, the lawmakers have turned to an experienced hand. He has played significant roles in high-profile intelligence inquiries, including the Iran-Contra investigation of the 1980s and the Senate probe of CIA turncoat Aldrich H. Ames in the early 1990s.

But the stakes of the Sept. 11 inquiry could prove considerably higher. Goss and other lawmakers say the outcome could influence the shape of the intelligence community for a generation and compare its significance to investigations of Pearl Harbor that led to the creation of the CIA in 1947.

Snider, who did not respond to a request for an interview, could face a delicate task managing the demands of committee members who have conflicting ideas over how aggressively the investigation should be conducted.

Goss and Graham, for example, have stressed that they want to avoid assigning blame for the Sept. 11 attacks. But Shelby, a frequent critic of Tenet, has argued that the committee should be prepared to hold officials accountable if evidence shows that they could or should have done more.