Where Does the Buck Stop?

A terrorist only needs to be lucky once; the authorities trying to stop him have to be lucky every time. Technically, of course, the terrorists got lucky at least four times on September 11th alone, but this warning is worth keeping in mind when reviewing yesterday's statement from the House and Senate Intelligence Committees.

Among other things, the report's headline-making bombshell—"America had 12 warnings of aircraft attack"—is somewhat less shocking on close investigation. Osama bin Laden's schemes for air warfare included one plot to attack the World Trade Center with a flight originating in Afghanistan and another to blow up the Egyptian presidential palace with an explosives-laden hang-glider. Such fanciful notions remind us that it wasn't a cabal of criminal geniuses who outsmarted and defeated us on 9/11, but they also give some idea why it was difficult for the intelligence community to put all the pieces together.

In fact, although the report doesn't go into this, the nature of the "Intelligence Community" described by joint inquiry staff director Eleanor Hill may have been a key to American vulnerability. The network with responsibility for collecting (and then largely ignoring) all these terrorist threats included not only the CIA and Army and Air Force intelligence, but the unsung National Reconnaissance Office and the Jimmy Carter-invented Department of Energy. It's probable that many staffers in these agencies were unaware of each others' existences, let alone of information that needed to be shared.

Undoubtedly, the Homeland Security Department is intended to make some sense of these competing interests. It would take a lifetime in government to imagine that the failures prior to September 11 were due to competition rather than to the complacency and laziness lifetime employment brings. Not one government official has been fired over these failures, and the Homeland Security bill is now stalled not because of massive flaws in the program, but because of an argument over how easy it should be for the President to fire incompetent employees within the department. Tom Ridge, last reported seen on the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, might want to kick-start that process by relieving himself of duty.

Not that we should expect any accountability even from Ridge's boss. As Hill notes in her report, the joint inquiry was barred from investigating how much of this prior information was available to President Bush (though a section on Senior Executive Intelligence Briefings suggests that most or all of it was). Thus we're left with at least one stylistic point unresolved: When Bush claimed his administration had no idea that terrorists would "use airplanes to kill" was he lying the same way Ari Fleischer lied about the credible threat to Air Force One? More cosmically, does the buck stop anywhere in Washington these days?

And who's going to tell Cynthia McKinney she may have been on to something?