9/11: Outside Probe Needed

In those raw early days when public fear smoldered along with the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush rightly refused to point a finger at intelligence agency failures. But nine months is more than enough time to wait for a fair and sober investigation of what went wrong and how it can be fixed.

Bush and Republican lawmakers should be supporting, not fighting, Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle’s (D-S.D.) call for an independent commission to probe why, in retrospect, the United States looked like such a fat, easy target.

House Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-Texas), among others, has declared that it will be a boon to Osama bin Laden if the U.S. publicly scrutinizes its intelligence weaknesses. But no one’s talking about inviting Al Qaeda to update blueprints of America’s nuclear reactors. What would be stupidly unpatriotic is to stick our heads in the sand.

Unfortunately, the House-Senate Select Intelligence Committee’s attempt to investigate has been as ineffective as the intelligence community’s follow-up on pre-9/11 warnings of terrorists’ possible enrollment in flight schools. FBI and CIA uncooperativeness is a big part of the problem. Then there’s the matter of the House and Senate’s own failures to exercise their oversight responsibilities more carefully before Sept. 11. In fact, no branch of government has a real incentive to carry out a diligent investigation.

That’s why it’s imperative for Congress to appoint an independent and bipartisan panel, headed by leaders with the clout to reach authoritative conclusions. We nominate Warren B. Rudman and Gary Hart, former senators whose commission on terrorism in February of last year called for a Cabinet-level agency to address the growing terrorist threat. The panel could look at the record of the CIA under the Clinton administration’s R. James Woolsey and current Director George J. Tenet. It could poke hard at inadequate congressional oversight. And it would help explain why Bush wasn’t given more solid and precise information before 9/11.

Despite DeLay’s huffing and harrumphing about the need to give the administration a free hand in wartime, a spooked public is eager for answers. The government’s flurry of vague warnings this week suggests that the administration doesn’t have much of a handle on new threats.

A hard-nosed independent commission could do more than a battery of antiaircraft guns or a troop of sky marshals to bolster America’s defenses.