UNCONNECTED DOTS

The most damning aspect of the revelation that President Bush was warned more than a month before Sept. 11 that Osama bin Laden might try to hijack American airplanes is not that the administration failed to take specific action on what, at least at present, appears to have been a general assessment of threat. Nor is it that the most highly trained, best-equipped intelligence agencies in the world failed, as the phrase of the day goes, to connect the dots.

It is, as one anonymous intelligence official said amid the orgy of finger-pointing, that no one agency had access to all the dots that needed connecting.

The trail of mistakes leading to and from Sept. 11 is long and winding, and there is little doubt that the failure of the White House to tell the country of a pertinent Aug. 6 presidential briefing adds to it. Before the partisan blame game goes any further, it is worth noting that House and Senate intelligence committees received many of the same reports congressional critics now accuse Mr. Bush of ignoring. Until Sept. 11, however, Congress was as silent as the executive branch on such issues as improved intelligence gathering and more stringent airport security.

The scattered dots include broad assessments going back nearly two years that al-Qaida was planning to shift its focus from overseas attacks against America – such as the USS Cole bombing in Yemen – to domestic targets. They also include specific warnings, a flurry of which came in the summer of 2001: an FBI memo indicating several Arabs were taking flight training; a CIA briefing that al Qaeda was interested in hijacking American planes; a decision that Attorney General John D. Ashcroft should not take commercial flights; and the arrest of Zacarias Moussaoui, who was believed to be training for a suicide hijacking.

To call this a systemic breakdown is not quite accurate – that would imply that there was a system. What Americans have learned the past the past eight months about their intelligence and security agencies – CIA, FBI, INS, FAA, Customs – is that what should be a unified mission is broken into small and discrete pieces, with no overarching authority, no exchange of information and apparently no real desire to change. There have been a few improvements, such as the joint daily briefings CIA and FBI directors now give the White House, but integration of fieldwork remains unacceptably balkanized. The House and Senate joint investigation into pre-Sept. 11 intelligence is so bogged down that the staff director of the committee quit in frustration recently and committee members have yet to agree upon a replacement.

It is hard to imagine how this new politicization of a failure of government for which both parties and two of its three branches share responsibility can turn to real progress, but it simply must. The White House could lead the way by not accusing every congressional critic of merely seeking political advantage and by conceding that its excessively insular habits are part of the problem. Congress could lead the way by dropping the righteous outrage, admit that many members had access to the same information as the president and begin rebuilding the joint investigation into the nation’s intelligence structure into something credible and productive. Better still, the White House and Congress could begin leading at the same time.