STYMIED INTELLIGENCE

The year before Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar helped hijack American Airlines flight 77 and fly it into the Pentagon, they lived in San Diego in the home of an FBI source. Mr. Mihdhar was suspected in the attack on the USS Cole and was known by the agency to have participated in an al-Qaida meeting in Malaysia. When the FBI grasped in August 2001 that a major attack was likely, they looked for the two men

but could not find them.

A lengthy assessment released last week by the Justice Department’s inspector general, Glenn A. Fine, concluded the FBI had numerous opportunities to stop these terrorists but for a variety of reasons failed to do so. Similarly, it failed to act on a warning from an agent in an Arizona office that made the link between al-Qaida and aviation instruction. The inspector general’s report was completed a year ago but only recently released after a 115-page section of the report concerning Zacarias Moussaoui was redacted. The report, while damning in many respects, did not recommend disciplinary action against any FBI agent.

Though the public is only now seeing the report, Congress and the 9-11 Commission had access to it more than a year ago. Given the horrific nature of

9-11, the multiple investigations into what happened and how it might be prevented and the overhaul of intelligence community last year, the public could expect progress to be substantial. Instead, news about the FBI concerns its Virtual Case File system, a $170 million failure that was supposed to efficiently share case-management information that instead exposed deeper problems in the FBI’s information technology.

What’s more, the Bush administration hasn’t met the goals approved by Congress to overhaul the intelligence community. Recently, Sens. Susan Collins and Joseph Lieberman, chairman and ranking member of the committee that wrote the overhaul, pointed out to the White House that is hasn’t complied with the development of a National Strategy for Transportation Security, “a central recommendation

of the 9-11 Commission,” which was supposed to be in place by April. Nor has it adequately implemented a Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board – it has nominated a board but supplied an insufficient budget. Nor has it, in the senators’ opinion, sufficiently built an “information-sharing environment (ISE) to facilitate the government-wide sharing of information about terrorist threats.”

The mistakes exposed since 9-11 are qualified by the simplicity of looking backward at a disaster unfolding. But the reforms proposed by the inspector general and by Congress look into the complicated world of the immediate future and anticipating the shortcomings of pre-9-11. These changes are too important to let slide, to trust that good intention and hard work will overcome institutional weaknesses.

Congress should demand an accounting of progress without further delay.