Post-9/11 Responsibility and Accountability

As the 9/11 commission finishes calling witnesses, the frenzy of blame-tossing is being replaced by a growing debate about the need for reform of the CIA and the FBI. Despite revelations that a pile of hair-rasing intelligence material was systematically ignored by senior administration members, Bush, Rice, Ashcroft and others have sought to deflect personal blame with suggestions that the US intelligence agencies require major reforms. Such diversionary tactics pre-empt the findings of the commision in a very dangerous way. A political whitewash would be bad enough, but absolving the neo-cons of blame while giving them carte-blanche authority to overhaul the CIA and FBI would be an absolute disaster.

It's true that, even under an Al Gore presidency, 9/11 may not have been prevented. As a result, some degree of intelligence agencies reform may indeed be justified. But the truth is that the USA has already implemented massive changes - most notably the Department of Homeland Security and the dangerously intrusive Patriot Act - that ensure such an attack would be very, very hard to duplicate.

The commision's findings have revealed errors within the CIA, the FBI and other agencies. Far more importantly, however, they have highlighted the blinkered ideological attitude of a White House bent on distorting, suppressing, inventing and ignoring the truth. What use are thousands of intelligence-gathering spooks if the heads of state do not want to see, hear or read their findings, let alone act in response to them?

As former Clinton advisor Sidney Blumenthal notes, Bush did not even read the President's Daily Briefs that Clinton used to personally examine and edit. "It seems highly unlikely that he read the national intelligence estimate on WMD before the Iraq war that consigned contrary evidence and caveats that undermined the case to footnotes and fine print. Nor is there any evidence that he read the state department's 17-volume report, The Future of Iraq, warning of nearly all the postwar pitfalls, that was shelved by the neocons in the Pentagon and Vice-President Cheney's office."

In such an environment, it is impossible to consider the 9/11 failures without also examining the subsequent "intelligence failures" that led the USA into war with Iraq: the WMDs that did not exist, Saddam's illusionary ties with Al-Quaeda, Nigerian yellowcake, mobile biological weapons labs and other fantasies of neo-conservative conjuring. As one senior intelligence officer says, "The Pentagon began with fantasy assumptions on Iraq and worked back."

Paul Wolfowitz's Office of Special Plans, for example, was created by the neo-cons to subvert or by-pass the traditional intelligence networks, cherry-picking information to suit the ideological aims of the war-mongerers. This must not be allowed to happen again, and those responsible must take the blame for the subsequent "intelligence errors", not to mention the ordinary lives these so-called errors have cost.

The commisioners on the 9/11 panel must not allow themselves to be restricted from extending their mandate to fully examine these larger problems of manipulated, distorted and ignored intellingce. A proper inquiry will lead us all the way back to the creation of the CIA and Roosevelt's warnings against fascist infiltrators, with a special focus on the Nixon administration and the shadowy roles played by people like Dick Cheney and George H. W. Bush (snr.). Rather than giving these people further control of the spy networks they have been working to subvert for over half a century, the 9/11 commision should force them to accept responsibility for their errors and ensure that the intelligence agencies are no longer encumbered by their neo-fascist, right-wing, pseudo-Christian ideological agendas.