9/11 Commission: Failure No. 5

July 30, 2004

Next week I’ll get back to Iraq and related matters, where things aren’t exactly going swimmingly. But for today: The fifth installment of my critique of the 9/11 Commission. I was happy to see David Ignatius’ Post column today, one of the first blanket indictments of the commission’s wrong-headed approach to “fixing” intelligence:

Okay, America, here's our intelligence reform agenda: The CIA recognized six years ago that America was at war with al Qaeda, so let's demote it. . . . Pentagon officials dragged their feet on dealing with terrorism, so let's give them more power. . . . The White House politicized the intelligence process, so let's create a new intelligence czar in the White House and give him control over domestic spying, too. The intelligence community suffers from too many fiefdoms, so let's create a few more.

Maybe that's an unfair summary of the recommendations made by the Sept. 11 Commission. But as President Bush and John Kerry race to endorse the commission's agenda for change, you'd think the proposals had been handed down from heaven itself, rather than offered up for public discussion.

Bravo. Kerry’s unthinking endorsement of the 9/11 Commission is craven and absurd. And Bush, purporting to consult with his national security team (as if he could ever grasp the issues at stake) may implement a lot of the commission’s terrible ideas right away. Both Kerry and Bush seem to want to accelerate the FBI’s transition from fighting crime and criminals to spying on Americans. So here is my fifth, and last, critique.

Thing Five. The commission, not unlike backers of the USA PATRIOT Act and other terrorism crusaders, casts the FBI as a domestic CIA, with barely a caveat:

We do not recommend the creation of a new domestic intelligence agency. It is not needed if our other recommendations are adopted… The FBI does need to be able to direct its thousands of agents and other employees to collect intelligence in America’s cities and towns—interviewing informants, conducting surveillance and searches, tracking individuals, working collaboratively with local authorities, and doing so with meticulous attention to detail and compliance with the law. The FBI’s job in the streets of the United States would this be a domestic equivalent, operating under the U.S. Constitution and quite different laws and rules, to the job of the CIA’s operations officers abroad.

But nowhere does the commission explain against whom these “surveillance and searches” would be directed. After 9/11, Attorney General Ashcroft warned that there were 5,000 Al Qaeda sleepers in the United States, but nary one has been found—and none have committed any acts of terrorism. Yet the FBI has reinvented itself, beefing up its Joint Terrorism Task Forces, creating an Office of Intelligence, and reorienting many of its crime-fighting agents to intelligence, not law enforcement. The commission praises all this, and urges more:

The Director of the FBI has proposed creating an Intelligence Directorate as a further reinforcement of the FBI intelligence program…. Recommendation: A specialized and integrated national security workforce should be established at the FBI consisting of agents, analysts, linguists and surveillance specialists who are recruited, trained, rewarded, and retained to ensure the development of an institutional culture imbued with a deep expertise in intelligence and national security. The president, by executive order, should direct the FBI to develop an intelligence cadre.

Of course the commission doesn’t need to recommend the creation of an MI5-style domestic spy agency. They’ll just turn the FBI into one. Hmmm. I wonder who knows you are reading this?