TNR's Michelle Cottle writes against the conventional wisdom on the 9/11 commission -- arguing that its hearings should not be televised and that its focus should be proscriptive and not diagnostic-- and gets it totally wrong, IMHO.

Cottle writes:

It's not that the hearings have failed to deliver plenty of drama--and even a bit of comedy. (Tom DeLay upset over "partisan mudslinging"? Stop it! You're killing me!) But a more productive approach to this whole business would have been to let the commission conduct its politically delicate mission away from the klieg lights while the rest of us obsessed about something even more important--like the fact that two and a half years after 9/11, we are still sitting ducks for another Al Qaeda attack.

But my office is proof that there is already a library full of the kinds of blue-ribbon task force reports that advocate intelligence community reforms and "eliminating barriers to aggressive collection of information on terrorists" and improved technology and information sharing at the FBI, that have gone not only unimplemented, but largely unread and undigested by the very political and technocratic and policy experts that need to be held accountable.

Indeed, Iraq czar Jerry Bremer led just such a commission, calling in testimony before the the Senate Intelligence committee in June 2000:

We also need more vigorous FBI intelligence collection against foreign terrorists in America and better dissemination of that information. The FBI's role in collecting intelligence about terrorists is increasingly significant...Yet, the Commission believes unclear guidelines for investigations and an overly cautious approach by the Department of Justice in reviewing applications for electronic surveillance against international terrorism targets are hampering the Bureau's intelligence collection efforts. We recommend improvements in both of these areas.

Once the information is collected by the FBI, technology shortfalls and institutional practices limit efforts to exploit the information and get it into the hands of those who need it--such as intelligence analysts and policymakers...

Dissemination of general intelligence information has not traditionally been an important part of the FBI's mission. They do a good job of sharing specific threat information but, otherwise, sharing information is not given a high priority. In fact, if the information is not specific enough to issue a warning or is not relevant to an investigation or prosecution, it may not even be reviewed. Information collected in field offices often never even makes it to headquarters.

The post 9/11 revelations about the "Phoenix memo" and the Moussaoui arrest and the FBI's failure to understand it had future 9/11 hijackers Nawaf Al-Hazmi and Khalid Al-Midhar in the home of an FBI informant in San Diego make very clear that Bremer's recommendations above were totally on-target -- and totally ignored. Cottle's advice would have the 9/11 commission simply add its potentially similarly prescient recommendations to such a pile. What's more, Cottle frowns on the very media strategy that has put 9/11 commissioners all over the airwaves that is exactly what is needed to build momentum, public interest and political support for its findings and future recommendations.

If there's no clear map of individual professional accountability and system and agency and political failure, what's to really be the impetus for serious reform and restructuring? Do we really want another dry academic task force report that advocates some ideal counter-terrorism system and calls for a domestic intelligence agency to replace the FBI's counterterrorism function, rather than an intricately-researched diagnosis that makes the appropriate agency officials and political actors extremely uncomfortable? That spells out exactly how, as Cottle writes, "the most powerful nation in the world got its clock cleaned by a bunch of deranged holy warriors?"

Posted by Laura at April 24, 2004 08:51 AM