The report: what's known, what's needed
The report identifies 10 instances when the CIA and the FBI missed opportunities to disrupt the 9/11 plot. "The flaw was not recognizing the significance of the information that we did have and acting on it promptly," says a senior CIA official. But the broader failure the commission identifies is one of bureaucratic inertia. Commissioners were surprised at the lack of appreciation among top intelligence and law enforcement officials about how little information was really being shared. "People at the top thought they were talking," Commissioner Fred Fielding said, even though such sharing rarely occurred at the lower levels.
The report also notes that the rest of the nation was hardly mobilized for the fight. Very little domestic counterterrorism planning had been done. Congress is blasted for failing to carry out meaningful oversight of intelligence and law enforcement agencies. Even the airlines get hit for their strategy of "decry, deny, and delay" in opposing stricter security measures.
Reforms. The FBI took expected fire for its many lapses, but it also escaped relatively unscathed when it came to the final recommendations. "One reason the commission was not harsher on the FBI was because of a guy named Bob Mueller," says commission staff director Philip Zelikow. FBI Director Mueller waged a relentless (and apparently successful) campaign to head off any call to create a new domestic intelligence agency.
When it came to the intelligence community, however, the proposed changes are much more radical. The biggest is the call to appoint a national intelligence director above the CIA director to oversee more than a dozen intelligence agencies. This would entail wresting budgetary and personnel control away from the Pentagon, which controls the bulk of the intelligence budget today. The commission would also create a new National Counterterrorism Center to direct the war on terror.
Similar proposals have been made before, but this time they're backed by the commission's uniquely powerful mandate. Still, opponents are already assembling. Many on Capitol Hill will resist calls to streamline oversight roles. And the intelligence agencies are sure to defend their turf against the notion of a national intelligence director. "The concern," says one intelligence official, "is that you're not going to make the counterterror apparatus more nimble by creating additional layers of bureaucracy."
The families of 9/11 victims are concerned about such responses. "I expect enormous resistance," says Stephen Push, whose wife at the time was a passenger on Flight 77. "These people enjoy the power they have." -Kevin Whitelaw and Chitra Ragavan
With Julian E. Barnes, Angie Cannon and Samantha Levine
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