IN AN editorial appearing in The Washington Post on Sunday, Sen. Robert Torricelli (D-N.J.) called for an independent board of inquiry to determine what went wrong with American intelligence that allowed the Sept. 11 attacks to occur. Torricelli is entirely correct and before increased money should be shifted to homeland security, our intelligence system must be fixed. The best way to do this is to create an independent inquiry panel to probe the events leading up to Sept. 11.
Any good Republican will tell you that you cannot fix a problem simply by throwing money at it. The White House wants to double homeland security to $38 billion and is calling for the largest defense increase in two decades, but these measures will prove grossly inadequate if our intelligence system is not fixed first.
The intelligence community failed to foresee the largest terrorist attack in American history. The question needs to be asked: What were they doing instead? This was the first time America had been attacked directly since Pearl Harbor, and just like then, the country was totally unprepared. People in the intelligence community need to be answering questions about what they were doing, and why they failed despite $30 billion in intelligence spending that American taxpayers provide.
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Many will say that the attacks were impossible to predict. Certainly they were impossible to predict for anyone who happened to be in the World Trade Center or Pentagon when they were struck by terrorists. But this is the intelligence community's job. So many different agencies proved inept and incompetent leading up to Sept. 11 that it is hard to know who to blame.
Perhaps the CIA and their director George J. Tenet did not figure out that al Qaeda terrorists were planning a deadly attack on the United States. Perhaps the FBI is to blame, since some of the terrorists actually were living in the United States. According to a 1999 New Yorker article by Seymour M. Hersh called "Intelligence Gap," even back then, the National Security Agency was unable to listen and read encrypted telephone calls, radio signals and e-mails of America's enemies because of deficient technology. Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), the ranking minority member of the Senate intelligence committee, has said that Sept. 11 was "the last big intelligence failure" ("Meet the Press," Feb. 10). Now President Bush wants Congress and Americans to blindly throw money at a system that has been unable to stop Osama bin Laden for the last decade.
The Senate and House intelligence committees plan to have a joint investigation into the U.S. intelligence community's response to terrorism over the last 16 years. The Washington Post reported last Tuesday that Bush warned Congress to be careful not to burden the defense and intelligence communities with a comprehensive investigation.
Bush feels that the war on terror must be won, and that therefore all resources should be focused on that rather than on trying to find out what happened on Sept. 11. Torricelli points out that 11 days after Pearl Harbor was bombed, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order creating a board of inquiry into the events. If Roosevelt could spare resources to figure out what went wrong then, Bush's excuses make no sense.
The best form of inquiry would be done by an independent board as Torricelli points out. The problem with having the Senate and House intelligence committees do it is that they are in charge of overseeing the intelligence community and obviously have done a poor job. An independent board of inquiry also would reduce the rampant partisanship already prevalent in an election year and result in objective conclusions.
Even Newt Gingrich, the former Republican Speaker of the House, believes that it is time to get answers from the intelligence community about what happened before Sept. 11. In a Nov. 26 New Yorker interview, he said, "We need to hold some people accountable for the last couple of years. I don't think you can just walk off and say that the very people who couldn't find bin Laden for six years are now looking for bin Laden, and say, 'Gee, don't you feel comfortable now?'"
This is not a call for a witch-hunt, ending in pointing the finger of blame at the American intelligence community for their poor job performance. Rather, it is meant to find constructive solutions to the problems that exist so that these agencies will better be able to win the war on terrorism.
Opponents of an inquiry panel will claim that the intelligence community already stops many plots that most Americans don't know about. This is a dubious claim as to why our intelligence methods should not be reformed. If our intelligence actually has managed to foil hundreds of attacks against this country, let an inquiry board analyze what went right in those situations, and what went wrong on Sept. 11.
(Harris Freier's column appears Fridays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at hfreier@cavalierdaily.com.)
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