Accountability counts

We've all seen this movie before: Government intelligence-gathering, distribution, and interpretation break down with dire consequences; politicians blame the other party and spend millions on politically tainted investigations; the White House tries to contain the damage; television producers inflict supposed intelligence experts on us day after day, night after night; thick reports spew out information but recoil from fixing blame and say instead that since everybody is to blame, nobody is to blame.

But nobody gets fired; the executive admits "mistakes were made," and promises they won't be made again; Congress throws more money at the government agencies that fumbled the ball in the first place. Finally, the government and the press move on to other things until the next intelligence failure comes along.

This old script is playing out right now as the media and others demand to know what President Bush and the government knew before 9/11 about terrorist plans to blow up American buildings with hijacked airliners. We outside the government see the smoke but don't know how much fire is under it. If the past is any guide, as it almost always is, we will never learn the whole truth about the intelligence failures that kept Bush from being warned about the 9/11 attacks. Government leaders and their secrecy stamps will see to that. Can't compromise sources and methods, you know. Don't be unpatriotic by demanding full accountability. Don't distract us from fighting the war.

In this new era of public nervousness, that old approach isn't good enough, if it ever was. Americans will continue to accept risks and remain supportive only as long as they feel their government is leveling with them about the terrorist threat and the efforts being taken to combat it-as well as being honest about what is not being done about the threat. If citizens conclude that their government is lying or obfuscating about its efforts to defeat terrorism, the mortar holding the bricks of democracy together will crumble. The terrorists will have won.

Congress, especially on today's divided Hill, is too polarized to provide the needed accountability on recent intelligence failures and is lacking the leadership to prevent future ones. Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr's excesses in the Clinton-Lewinsky probe poisoned the well for special-prosecutor investigations. Relying on the administration to investigate itself is not the answer. The president's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and other insider-review bodies have proved too secretive. The military's accountability mechanisms, once outstanding, have been short-circuited by presidents assuming the blame themselves, as John F. Kennedy did in 1961 following the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion and as Ronald Reagan did in 1983 after a suicide bomber destroyed the Marine barracks in Lebanon.

So what we need now is a new and unimpeachable outside commission, chaired by respected people with no political ambitions, to probe intelligence failures. This commission must proceed without fear or favor and give a full accounting to the public. My nominees to co-chair this first one on 9/11 are former Presidents Ford, a Republican, and Carter, a Democrat. Long before 9/11, there were intelligence failures that were never probed adequately. Here are just a few with big questions still hanging over them:

• Bay of Pigs invasion, 1961. The CIA assured the president, with no apparent dissent from the military's Joint Chiefs of Staff, that the Cuban people would rise up to topple Fidel Castro once the CIA-sponsored invaders landed on the island. Who was responsible for that miscalculation? We still don't know. Although Richard Bissell, the CIA operations chief, was publicly criticized for the failure, Kennedy after the invasion awarded him a medal in a secret White House ceremony. Bissell later told an associate that Kennedy thanked him for shouldering the blame and said: "In a parliamentary form of government I would be out on my ass."
• USS Liberty spy ship, 1967. Was the Israeli attack on this U.S. Navy ship premeditated, as the officer of the deck at the time claims? Neither Congress nor any other government agency has had the guts to look into this and give the public a full accounting.
• Tet offensive, 1968. Why did this massive communist offensive come as a surprise to Gen. William C. Westmoreland, U.S. field commander in Vietnam, shortly after he had assured Congress that victory was in sight?
• USS Pueblo spy ship, 1968. Why didn't U.S. intelligence pass along to the skipper warnings from an eavesdropping plane controlled by the National Security Agency that North Korean forces were about to board and capture the ship?
• Collapse of the Soviet Union, 1991. Why didn't intelligence agencies detect this monumental development and inform the president long before the Berlin Wall came down in 1989?
• Terrorist attack on the Marine barracks in Beirut, 1983. Did the lax security at the base stem from a failure of civilian and military intelligence to warn of terrorist activity?
• Pakistan-India nuclear detonations, 1998. Why did they surprise the intelligence community?

The bottom line is that Americans-especially those men and women in harm's way-need and deserve a better public accounting of intelligence failures.