Stonewalling on Intelligence Failures

President Bush offered a welcome announcement yesterday that he will appoint a bipartisan commission to examine American intelligence gathering. But the devil is in the details. The president will make the appointments; the scope of inquiry could be so broad as to evade specific questions about what went wrong in Iraq; and most importantly, the findings of the commission won’t be available until 2005.

• The security of America should not be beholden to President Bush’s re-election needs. Intelligence failures are too important to America’s safety to follow the political timeline of the White House. The nation needs to know as soon as possible what went wrong, for what reason, and how the administration plans to fix it so the failures that occurred prior to Iraq don’t happen again.
• Politicizing the intelligence process threatens our long-term security. Thanks to the administration’s stonewalling in handing over key documents and the refusal of officials to testify, we still don’t know what information was available prior to 9/11 that might have provided warning of an attack, what fully happened on 9/11 or how best to prevent another devastating attack. Now, the administration wants to delay answering legitimate questions about why our intelligence – or the use of this intelligence – dramatically overstated the threat from Iraq and understated threats from Iran, North Korea, and Pakistan that we now face. Refusing to answer tough questions leaves us more vulnerable and open to future mistakes that could threaten our safety.
• Any independent commission should offer real ways to improve our intelligence gathering. Examining past problems is not enough – the president’s commission needs to offer concrete proposals for reforming our intelligence structure, including ways to improve intelligence gathering and analysis on weapons of mass destruction and terrorist threats, and better decision making processes to ensure accuracy and proper deliberation of intelligence materials.
  

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