What About Civil Liberties?

The flipside of the 9/11 warnings.

President Bush says that we shouldn't be "second-guessing" his decisions before September 11, when it now appears he had warning that some sort of attack was going to occur. Fine. How about his decisions after the attacks? The administration's explanation for why it was unable to prevent the hijackings is believable, in its broad outlines if not in every particular detail. But if nothing else, the new revelations undercut the rationale for the surveillance powers the government has gathered to itself since last September.

Long before last week, it was clear that America's intelligence agencies received scattered signals of the coming attacks. Many of us argued in the months after September 11 that our vulnerability stemmed less from limits on the government's ability to spy than from the intelligence bureaucracy's failure to connect that data into a coherent portrait of the threat. Now we know how strong those signals were, and just how terrible the bureaucrats' failure was.

So what have our intelligence agencies done since September11?

On one hand, they asked for, and received, a host of new powers in an anti-terror bill, including the right to engage in secret searches, warrantless Internet surveillance, warrantless access to phone records, and a requirement that retailers report "suspicious" customer transactions to the Treasury.

Civil libertarians warned that powers like these could be abused -- and, indeed, had been abused at many times in American history. Nonetheless, the USA Patriot Act passed overwhelmingly, with some legislators voting for it without even reading it. Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) told Insight magazine that he was unable to get his hands on a copy of the bill before it passed. "Maybe a handful of staffers actually read it," he said, "but the bill definitely was not available to members before the vote."

Meanwhile, has there been an overhaul of the intelligence system? We're told that improvements have been made; and, hopefully, that's true. But we haven't even seen any heads roll: If anyone resigned or was fired over their inability to foresee and prevent the attacks, they did so far from the public eye. More to the point: We haven't had a public investigation of what went wrong and how it could be fixed, by Congress or, better, an independent commission not beholden either to present officeholders or to their more partisan-minded critics.

Instead, the feds have been running for cover, failing to release pertinent information and, now that this data has nonetheless seen daylight, smearing anyone who asks the obvious follow-up questions as -- in Dick Cheney's words -- "thoroughly irresponsible and totally unworthy of national leaders in time of war." Not surprisingly, the vice president also opposes appointing an independent commission to investigate the August 6 warning that terrorists were planning to hijack planes, saying, "Most of what we need to talk about here should not be talked about in open hearings."

So instead of a radically revamped intelligence establishment, we get the same people in their same posts trying to connect the dots and prevent the next terrorist attack. Only now they'll have a lot more dots to sort through -- most of them irrelevent.

The atrocities of September 11 were not a surveillance failure. They were an analysis failure. Now that we understand that, can't we reconsider the new incursions into our privacy that our leaders stampeded blindly into law?