Excessive secrecy will undermine public confidence

WASHINGTON — Even by the murky standards of most government documents, the interim report of the congressional intelligence committees examining the pre-Sept. 11 warnings is maddeningly opaque. The 31-page document, released Wednesday, is filled with references to vague entities called "the Intelligence Community" and "senior government officials."

The clotted prose is certainly not the fault of the report's author, Eleanor Hill, the staff director for the joint congressional inquiry. She labored under the arduous burden of trying to achieve clarity at a time when the government places an understandably high premium on secrecy.

Porter Goss, a former CIA agent who chairs the House Intelligence Committee, reflected congressional frustrations when he said, "I liked the version that we had before it had been redacted better." For those unfamiliar with national-security lingo, "redacted" means scrubbed clean of any potentially compromising information by the intelligence community.

Yet even the sanitized version contains tantalizing nuggets that may someday show up in a conspiracy-laden Oliver Stone movie. In April 2000, according to the report, someone walked into the FBI's Newark, N.J., office and announced that he had been in a terrorist training camp in Pakistan where he learned airplane-hijacking techniques. He said that others in the plot had pilot training and their plan was to fly a 747 to Afghanistan, a destination that should have pointed to al-Qaeda.

So how did the FBI react? The informant passed a polygraph test, but the bureau was unable to verify his story. Maybe this was a bizarre coincidence. Or maybe the FBI, grappling with more pressing law-enforcement concerns, merely went through the motions in trying to check out this seemingly outlandish conspiracy. That's all we know for the moment, unless the FBI is more forthcoming in upcoming public testimony before the joint congressional committee.

Sure, the FBI looks like the Keystone Cops of the anti-terrorism fight. At a press conference Thursday calling for an independent commission to probe pre-Sept. 11 intelligence lapses, Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., declared, "What the FBI did not do was scandalous."

But beating up on the bureau should not obscure the reality that there is no evidence that the attacks could have been prevented. As the report stressed, "It does not appear to date that the Intelligence Community had information prior to Sept. 11 that identified precisely where, when and how the attacks were to be carried out."

What is apparent is that the joint congressional inquiry will not provide final and definitive answers to the questions still plaguing America. Thursday morning's public hearing underscored the difficulty of reconciling secrecy with the need for a full accounting. The administration witnesses were known for their outspoken and, often conflicting, viewpoints. But Paul Wolfowitz, the hawkish deputy defense secretary, and Richard Armitage, his more conciliatory counterpart at the State Department, came across as so soporific that by noon the cavernous Senate hearing room was almost empty of legislators and reporters.

Every provocative question became ensnared in the thicket of confidential intelligence information. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., struggled to get Wolfowitz to confirm or deny the reality of the long-rumored meeting between terrorist ring-leader Mohamed Atta and an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague, Czech Republic. "Senator, this gets into a lot of classified areas," Wolfowitz began before veering off on a vague discussion of ongoing terrorist threats. By the time Wolfowitz repeated his mantra of the day ("We can't defeat terrorism by defense"), it was clear that Feinstein would never get an answer in public session.

Wolfowitz and Armitage were equally passionate on one point: the need to hear dissenting opinions in government meetings assessing intelligence information. They rightly argued that the intelligence community's bureaucratic desire to offer a bland consensus deprives policymakers of valuable alternative interpretations. As Wolfowitz put it, "Almost everything that's important is shrouded in uncertainty. Nothing is black or white. But there is a tendency to get everything scrubbed out."

It is ironic that these powerful national-security deputies seem to value intellectual conflict only in closed-door meetings. At a time when the administration is pressing Congress to close ranks immediately behind its Iraqi policy, there is an equal need for knowledgeable public debate and even dissent. It is worth knowing, for example, whether there are clashing interpretations within the administration about when Iraq is likely to acquire nuclear weapons. Or even whether there are lone voices who still argue that it is possible to disarm Saddam Hussein short of war.

Of course, this is not the moment for full disclosure of the details of the war on terrorism. Wolfowitz pointed out in his opening statement that a government leak "led Osama bin Laden to stop using a satellite phone that the U.S. had been monitoring."

But the national security team at times seems to be carrying its tight-lipped policy to extremes. The congressional report, for example, bristled with frustration that the CIA would not allow the committee to reveal which pre-Sept. 11 threat assessments were passed along to the president.

Granted, it is hard to strike the right balance between openness and confidentiality at a time when shadowy enemies menace America. But excessive secrecy will ultimately foster conspiracy theories and undermine public confidence. Whether or not Congress will offer the last word on what the government should have known before Sept. 11, there remains a continuing need to scrutinize the inbred intelligence community.

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