Phil Brennan, NewsMax.com
Monday, Oct. 22, 2001

After carefully skirting the question since the events of Black Tuesday for fear of lowering morale among intelligence agencies, congressional critics are ready to get the facts about one of the most alarming intelligence failures in U.S. history -- a failure that led to the deaths of thousands of innocent Americans.

Speaking on NBC's "Meet the Press" Sunday morning, Senator John McCain, R-Ariz., suggested that any investigation of the disastrous intelligence lapse be conducted by a special commission and not by Congress.

"I absolutely believe that we have to go back and see what happened, not in order to hang somebody at the yardarm or to disgrace anyone, but so that we will not make the mistakes again that we made before and can reorganize our intelligence services," McCain told his hosts.

On the same program, Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., agreed, recalling President Roosevelt's appointment of a commission chaired by a member of the U.S. Supreme Court, which was directed to probe the attack on Pearl Harbor.

"I hope the president will do something just like that real soon," he said.

After members of the House and Senate danced around the issue for several weeks, pressure mounted for a full-scale investigation aimed at uncovering the reasons why the CIA, FBI and other investigative agencies were unable to discover the existence of the plot that resulted in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Recognizing that any full-scale probe is bound to raise serious political questions, Congress originally ducked digging too deeply into such volatile matters as how much damage was done by Clinton-era prohibitions against hiring politically incorrect agents, the scandalous lack of multi-lingual agents capable of translating such languages as Arabic, and the failure of the FBI and CIA and other agencies to coordinate their anti-terrorist activities.

One of those on record as opposed to an investigation is former President Clinton, who many see as one of those responsible for the crippling of American's intelligence agencies.

As NewsMax.com reported on Oct. 12, Clinton said, "There will come a time we can look back and say, 'Well, who should have done what when.' And it ought to be done," Clinton told ABC's "Good Morning America."

"But now is not the time," he insisted.

No wonder he wants the facts swept under the rug. On the same date, NewsMax.com editor in chief Chris Ruddy revealed the extent of Clinton's culpability in the disastrous failure of our intelligence communities to alert the nation an attack was coming.

But as the initial shock of Black Tuesday has worn off, people on the Hill are beginning to focus on the matter of where the responsibility lies for the massive intelligence failure.

Just who will undertake the actual investigation has yet to be decided, and hints of controversies over turf rights have begun to arise.

According to the New York Times, Rep. Porter Goss, R-Fla., chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, has said that an investigation is looming, but no matter what it finds, historians will engage in debates over how such an attack could have taken place and on whom to pin the blame for the fact that the U.S. was completely surprised by the attack.

"It will be a little bit like the Kennedy assassination, I'm sure," ex-CIA agent Goss told the Times. "It'll go on forever and ever because we are never going to be totally certain, I think, about who did what to whom. You have to get into the minds of the perpetrators, and obviously there was more than one and those who have been incinerated are obviously unavailable."

On the Senate side of Capitol Hill, Alabama's Senator Richard Shelby, the ranking Republican on the intelligence panel, has been pushing for an investigation and demanding that CIA Director George Tenet be fired.

The Bush administration, however, continues to back Tenet, who was appointed to the job by former President Clinton.

"I think that George Tenet has done some good things, a lot of them that I'm not at liberty to talk about," Shelby told the Times. "But I also believe that there have been two, too many failures on his watch."

The Times notes that Congress' reluctance to go too deeply into the matter was the result of their fear of hampering the intelligence community at a time when the nation is now coping with new threats such as the widening anthrax attacks and other perils intelligence sources are now warning against.

"Protecting against the next waves is job No. 1, job No. 2 and job No. 3," Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif., a member of the House intelligence panel told the Times.

Sen. John Edwards, D-N.C., a member of the Senate intelligence committee, told the Times, "It's a balance between needing to fix anything that's wrong and making sure that we have as much in the way of resources out there doing the job against terrorism as you can have."

All observers agree that any deeply probing investigation will of necessity involve pinpointing the blame and result in serious ruptures in bipartisanship between the parties and even set various intelligence agencies at each other's throats.

Rep. Doug Bereuter, R-Neb., told the Times the F.B.I. will have to answer such embarrassing questions as to why it failed to share intelligence about suspected terrorists with other domestic agencies like the Federal Aviation Administration and the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

While members of Congress admit some of the problems date back to the Church Committee's clampdowns in the 1970s as a result of the Watergate scandals involving both the FBI and the CIA as well as the government's over-reliance on electronic reconnaissance and scorning of human intelligence, Republicans now point the finger squarely at former President Clinton, under whose watch U.S. intelligence operations were badly diminished.

"This is going to sound partisan, and I try not to be partisan on this matter," Rep. Goss told the Times. "But the fact is that the Clinton administration was not very interested in our intelligence community, did not spend very much time worrying about or using it, or investing in it." He added, "It's impossible not to go there if you really do an anatomy of why we are where we are today."

In his Sept. 11 column on Clinton's role in dismantling our intelligence agencies, Chris Ruddy quoted former CIA officials as laying the blame on Clinton, citing specific instances of the former president's meddling with the CIA's recruiting process, which robbed the agency of competent undercover operatives on specious human rights grounds.

Sen. Fred Thompson, R-Tenn., brought up former President Clinton's 1992 campaign slogan about the economy, saying, "For a decade or so we've had peace and prosperity -- 'it's the economy stupid' -- and matters of military and intelligence have become secondary considerations."

Among the controversies now existing on the Hill is the dispute between Goss, who strongly supports Tenet, and Shelby, who wants him dismissed as CIA head.

Shelby summed up the job facing whoever does the investigation, telling the Times, "A part of our job is to rigorously examine what our agencies do, what they need in resources, where are they lacking, and not to get too cozy with them."

Sen. Lieberman told "Meet the Press," however, that Congress should stay out of the matter. "It ought to be citizens," he said. "A lot of their meetings ought to be in private. But then they ought to tell the president and us to the best of their ability what went wrong, so we can make sure it never happens again."

And Sen. McCain said that former senators Warren B. Rudman, a New Hampshire Republican, and Gary Hart, a Colorado Democrat, should head any investigation, noting that they headed an earlier commission on national security that had accurately warned that the nation was ill-prepared to face the terrorist threat of the new century.

But members of Congress are certain to defend their turf, seeing Capitol Hill as the proper site of any inquiry. "Farming this out to other groups, I think, is inappropriate," Rep. Harman argued. "I think we should do it in private and public.

"We don't need a witch hunt now, or certainly not next year, in an election year," Harman told the Times.

Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
War on Terrorism
Clinton Scandals

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