9/11: Learn, Don’t Politick

So intelligence sources informed President Bush in August that Osama bin Laden’s terrorists might attempt to hijack airplanes? Excuse us, but administration officials have good reason to look perplexed as they wonder aloud what the increasingly indignant chorus of critics would have had the president do with that amorphous warning.

Smart politicians will leave the retroactive theorizing about Sept. 11 to the nation’s Art Bells and Oliver Stones, step past the infinite permutations of “what if” and get down to investigating how to assure that U.S. intelligence agencies are competent to prevent future catastrophes.

The Bush administration has tried to avoid inquiries about how the FBI, CIA and other agencies did their jobs in the weeks leading up to 9/11. But a relative wealth of significant information is emerging anyway.

An FBI agent in Phoenix seems to have come close to cracking the plot; in July, he wrote to FBI headquarters warning of Middle Eastern men attending American flight schools. In August, another FBI agent conjectured that Zacarias Moussaoui might have been training to fly a hijacked plane. And in 1999 the Library of Congress warned the CIA that Al Qaeda might use hijacked planes as weapons.

How can agencies coordinate their information so that vague hijacking threats reported to the CIA take on added meaning in light of FBI agents’ individual observations?

Congress is rightly insisting on expanding its inquiries. The House and Senate intelligence committees are conducting a joint investigation, but they have been stymied by foot-dragging at the CIA and FBI. Only Bush has the clout to pull the agencies into line and force them to cooperate.

As Congress prepares to spend additional billions on intelligence, it and the American public have a right to know where the government fell short before Sept. 11 and what it has learned from those failings.

Democratic leaders should not posture and pretend that it would have been a simple matter to prevent the unprecedented use of aircraft as terrorist-guided missiles. But unless the United States completely scrutinizes what went wrong, it will remain dangerously vulnerable.