The 9/11 Commission Report

Update from AIJAC

The 9/11 Commission Report

July 27, 2004
Number 07/04 #09

Today's Update focuses on analysis of the report of the American 9/11 commission late last week and the implications for the war on terrorism.

First, the Wall Street Journal comments on the implications of the findings of the commission, and finds that they actually make a strong case for the current American doctrine of pre-emption. For this important discussion, CLICK HERE.

Next, former academic security expert and Israel Ambassador to the United Nations Dore Gold looks at the terror links exposed by the 9-11 and earlier commissions, especially those between al-Qaeda and Iraq and al-Qaeda and Saudi Arabia. He also looks at their impact on post-war debates about justifications for the war. For this important synthesis of the information now available, CLICK HERE.

Finally, Iran specialist Michael Ledeen looks at the commission's especially with reference to al-Qaeda connections to Iran, and finds evidence of much more extensive cooperation than virtually anyone has up until now thought. He also has some comments on peoples' expectations from intelligence. For his full argument, CLICK HERE.

The Pre-emption Commission

The virtues of the Patriot Act, among other surprises.

Wall Street Journal
Friday, July 23, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT

So the doctrine of pre-emption has its uses, after all. In a world of conflicting intelligence, uncertain consequences and potential foreign opposition, it is still sometimes necessary for America to attack an adversary before it attacks us.

That, reduced to its essence, is the main conclusion of yesterday's 567-page report from the 9/11 Commission. The September 11 attacks may have been a shock, it says, but they never should have come as a surprise. Our government--and the entire political class--knew enough to act against al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, but it did not because of "failures of imagination, policy, capability, and management." Though the bipartisan report can't quite bring itself to use the words, it would seem that the Bush anti-terror doctrine lives.

These columns have been rough on the Commission, especially for the partisanship that has marked its deliberations. But perhaps our pounding helped, because its unanimous final report seems on our first reading to be better than the process that produced it. Its narrative history is especially helpful, filling in much of the record of what the government knew, when it knew it, and what it didn't do about it.

We refer readers specifically to the recitation of non-action that starts on page 11 of the executive summary. Beginning in 1997, the U.S. tried diplomacy to get the Taliban to drop al Qaeda and Pakistan to drop the Taliban, but the efforts failed. We now know that only an ultimatum turned Pakistan, and only military force toppled Mullah Omar.

The report discloses that the CIA failed to infiltrate the terrorist Islamic network with even a single spy. The FBI failed to share crucial information about terrorist suspects. In other words, our security bureaucracies became hidebound and self-protective over the years, and their cultures need a thorough shaking up.

The report is especially damning in its revelations about the law enforcement mindset toward terrorism that prevailed before 9/11. Top CIA analysts--many of whom are now critical of the Bush Administration--thought it was a manageable problem. FBI investigations were "geared toward prosecution," the report notes, and hampered by "perceived legal barriers to sharing information." Part of this was due to the infamous "wall of separation" between intelligence and law enforcement that was reinforced in 1995 by Clinton Deputy Attorney General (and 9/11 Commissioner) Jamie Gorelick. The Patriot Act took down that wall, and the report amounts to a rousing endorsement of that much-maligned legislation.

Notably, the Commission performs a service by defining the threat we now face in refreshing fashion. "The enemy is not just 'terrorism,' " it says. "It is the threat posed specifically by Islamic terrorism." Bush Administration officials say the same thing privately, but they have been reluctant to state this publicly lest they offend the broader body of peaceable Islam. But it is hard to defeat an enemy without defining who it is. And the fact that Islam has a problem with its radical factions is something that Muslims themselves have to face up to.

This failure to speak candidly has ramifications at home, too, specifically in the Transportation Department's continued failure to endorse racial profiling in airport security checks. The policy reduces the government's credibility among ordinary Americans who understand that the policy defies common sense. Commissioner John Lehman noted at one hearing that any airline that set aside more than two Middle Eastern-looking passengers for secondary security clearing at any one time still faces large anti-discrimination fines.

The report also sheds new light on the issue of "state sponsors" of terror, especially Iran and Iraq. The Iran information--including pass-through rights without border stamps for al Qaeda--should give pause to those who think diplomacy alone will mollify the mullahs.

As for Iraq, the final report retreats from its interim judgment that there was no "collaborative relationship." The Commission now says it found no "collaborative operational relationship" to attack the U.S., but it does record extensive and troubling contacts. This includes the news that Richard Clarke, the former NSC aide, himself believed that Iraq had ties to the chemical plant in Sudan that was linked to al Qaeda and bombed by Bill Clinton. The report quotes Mr. Clarke as speculating to a superior about an "Iraq-al Qida [sic] agreement" on the chemical plant. Our readers may recall that Mr. Clarke more recently said there was not a shred of evidence of such ties.

As for the Commission's many proposals, they deserve to be examined, though count us skeptical on the idea of unifying all intelligence agencies under the control of a Cabinet-level intelligence czar. It might change bureaucratic incentives for the better, but it might also create a new and equally dangerous kind of groupthink. At the very least Congress should wait until the intelligence review commission led by former Senator Charles Robb and federal appeals court Judge Laurence Silberman reports next year.

The details, however, should not obscure the Commission's larger message about the dangers of not acting against a looming threat. After a year of recriminations against a President who chose to act against another threat, in Iraq, the report may even do some good.

Who's Right on the War on Terrorism?

The 9/11 Commission, the U.S. Senate Assessment of Prewar Intelligence, and the British Butler Committee

Dore Gold

Jerusalem Issue Brief Vol. 3, No. 29
Jerusalem Centre for Public Affairs, 26 July 2004

The Bush administration never said that it went to war against Iraq in order to retaliate for the destruction of the World Trade Center and the attack on the Pentagon. It did warn that Iraq could transfer its prohibited weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups, especially to al-Qaeda.

Is there a real risk in the transfer of weapons of mass destruction from rogue states in the Middle East to terror groups? The resolution of this question will affect how the U.S. and its allies address other problematic states like Iran in the future. For example, Israeli military intelligence is warning that Iranian WMD are liable to be given to Hizballah. The credibility of warnings of this sort will be affected by the outcome of the U.S. debate.

What emerges from the intelligence presented in the 9/11 report is that Iraq had an ongoing and cooperative relationship with al-Qaeda that intensified after 2001. There were grounds for concern that if Iraq continued along the same path, expertise in weapons of mass destruction might have been provided to al-Qaeda. Indeed, British intelligence raised the possibility in March 2003 that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's "sleeper cells" in Baghdad, on the eve of the Iraq War, might use biological and chemical agents in a future insurgency against U.S. troops.

David Kay, who headed the Iraq Survey Group looking for weapons of mass destruction, said in early 2004: "We know there were terrorist groups in state [Iraq] still seeking WMD capability. Iraq, although I found no weapons, had tremendous capabilities in this area. A marketplace phenomenon was about to occur, if it did not occur; sellers meeting buyers. And I think that would have been dangerous if the war had not intervened."

The 9/11 Commission also examined the Saudi tie to terrorism, noting that it "does not exclude the likelihood that charities with significant government sponsorship diverted funds to al-Qaeda."

Is it necessary to produce a check signed by a senior Saudi official to an al-Qaeda operative in order to prove Saudi financial backing of the organization? Doesn't the movement of funds to al-Qaeda from charities financed and monitored by the Saudi government raise serious questions about Riyadh's past role in the growth of the new terrorism? Realistic expectations are necessary about the degree of proof that intelligence agencies can provide, if the war on terrorism is to succeed.

The most striking feature of the reporting on the work of the 9/11 Commission - as well as the earlier intelligence reports by the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and the Butler Committee in the UK - is how every side in the debate over the war on terrorism feels vindicated.

Quoting from the 9/11 Commission, Philip Shenon of the New York Times wrote on July 25, 2004, regarding al-Qaeda/Iraqi links: "To date we have seen no evidence that these or the earlier contacts ever developed into a collaborative operational relationship." 1This essentially repeated an earlier story by Shenon previewing the Commission's work on June 17, in which the New York Times featured a headline: "Panel Finds No Qaeda-Iraq Tie." 2Bush administration critic Richard A. Clarke repeated the "no collaborative relationship" line in a New York Times op-ed on July 25 as well. 3

In complete contrast to this conclusion, Stephen F. Hayes, in the August 2, 2004, issue of the Weekly Standard, cites Thomas Kean, the Republican co-chairman of the Commission, who declared: "There was no question in our minds that there was a relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda." 4Hayes also cites the Democratic co-chairman, Lee Hamilton, who sought to qualify the sweeping conclusions in the New York Times and other newspapers about there being no al-Qaeda/Iraq link: "We don't have any evidence of a cooperative or collaborative relationship between Saddam Hussein's government and al-Qaeda with regard to the attacks on the United States." Hamilton also states: "The vice president is saying, I think, that there were connections between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's government. We don't disagree with that." 5Clearly, he does not rule out a collaborative relationship between the two beyond the question of responsibility for the 9/11 attacks.

This has been the heart of the post-Iraq War debate. The Bush administration never said that it went to war against Iraq in order to retaliate for the destruction of the World Trade Center and the attack on the Pentagon. It did warn that Iraq could transfer its prohibited weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups, especially to al-Qaeda. Critics of the Iraq War assert that no such link between the secular Ba'athist regime of Saddam Hussein and the Islamist al-Qaeda was possible. There is also a controversy that has been ongoing during the last two years over the extent to which Saudi Arabia funds terror groups like al-Qaeda.

These debates go beyond American domestic politics. They actually go to the heart of the future of the war on terror. Can secular regimes and rogue states in the Middle East back terror groups with a completely different ideological agenda? Is there a real risk in the transfer of weapons of mass destruction from these regimes to terror groups? For example, Brig. Gen. Yossi Kuperwasser, the head of the research department of IDF Military Intelligence, warned the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee on July 19, 2004, that Iran is liable to give Hizballah non-conventional weapons. 6Thus, the resolution of this debate will affect how the U.S. and its allies address other problematic states, like Iran, in the future. To address the divergent conclusions about the content of the 9/11 report, it is necessary to go beyond the headlines and look at the details of what was presented.

Iraq/al-Qaeda: From Contacts to Cooperation

The roots of al-Qaeda/Iraqi collaboration, according to the 9/11 Commission, date back to the early 1990s when the Sudanese political leader Hassan al-Turabi sought to create a confederation of anti-American groups that included Sunni Islamists like bin Laden, Arab nationalists, and even Shiites from Hizballah. Egyptian Nasserists, the PLO, and Hamas were also involved. The critical question when looking at the al-Qaeda/Iraq link was whether al-Turabi managed to only cause the two parties to probe one another through limited contacts or if something more institutionalized was created.

According to the 9/11 Commission: "Bin Laden was also willing to explore possibilities for cooperation with Iraq, even though Iraq's dictator, Saddam Hussein, had never had an Islamist agenda." This clearly went beyond "contacts" alone, for the 9/11 Commission states that "Turabi reportedly brokered an agreement that Bin Laden would stop supporting activities against Saddam." This effective non-aggression pact was not a full-blown alliance, but it was more than just a secret discussion between adversaries.

The 9/11 Commission further states that bin Laden "apparently honored this pledge, at least for a time." What constrained their mutual understanding was al-Qaeda's backing of Kurdish Islamists who, in any case, were beyond the sphere of influence of Baghdad. However, even this limitation would be removed. The Kurdish Islamists reformed into a new organization in 2001 and created Ansar al-Islam. The 9/11 Commission explains that Saddam Hussein's regime may have helped Ansar al-Islam against "the common Kurdish enemy" - the pro-American Kurdish groups in northern Iraq that had been under U.S.-UK coalition air cover since 1991.

Regardless of the Ansar al-Islam issue, there were repeated Iraqi/al-Qaeda contacts that persisted in the 1990s, according to the 9/11 Commission. In late 1994 or early 1995, a senior Iraqi intelligence officer met bin Laden in Khartoum. In March 1998, two al-Qaeda members went to Iraq for meetings with Iraqi intelligence. Four months later, an Iraqi delegation went to Afghanistan to meet with the Taliban and then with bin Laden. Within a year, Iraqi officials would offer bin Laden a safe haven in Iraq, according to the 9/11 Commission. This warming of the connection can be attributed to Ayman al-Zawahiri, whose Egyptian Islamic Jihad merged with al-Qaeda in 1998. U.S. intelligence disclosed by author Stephen Hayes reported that al-Zawahiri himself visited Baghdad and met with Iraq's vice president on February 3, 1998. 7

A real change in the relationship can be discerned after 2001, if the British and Senate intelligence reports are also examined. After the overthrow of the Taliban, a number of al-Qaeda refugees sought a safe haven in the Kurdish areas controlled by Ansar al-Islam, which, as noted above, was receiving help from Baghdad, even if it was geographically situated in a zone beyond the control of the Iraqi regime. The British Butler report details how British intelligence made it clear that "al-Qaeda-linked facilities in the Kurdish Ansar al-Islam area were involved in the production of chemical and biological agents." Secretary of State Colin Powell spoke about this terrorist WMD facility before the UN Security Council on February 5, 2003. While expressing doubts about other details in his speech, the Senate intelligence report backed up Powell on the details of what he said on terrorism.

The Butler report also explains that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, whom it described as "a senior al-Qaeda figure," was free to travel throughout Iraq in 2002. By March 2003, the British noted that "al-Qaeda-associated terrorists continued to arrive in Baghdad." According to intelligence in the Butler report, al-Zarqawi was establishing "sleeper cells in Baghdad" that were to be activated for a post-invasion insurgency against U.S. forces in Iraq. British intelligence raised the possibility that, besides employing car bombs, these cells would use chemical or biological materials. Al-Qaeda, it reported, "has shown interest in gaining chemical and biological (CB) expertise from Iraq." But the British did not know one way or the other if this expertise was actually provided. CIA Director George Tenet went one step further than the British. In September 2002 he told a closed session of the Senate Intelligence Committee that Iraq had provided al-Qaeda with WMD training, noting that despite his suspicions about Islamic groups, Saddam Hussein was not averse "to enhancing bin Laden's operational capabilities." 8

With hindsight, some questions stand out. Could al-Zarqawi move around Iraq without the knowledge and support of Iraqi security authorities? And could al-Zarqawi erect sleeper cells for a postwar insurgency in the heart of the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, without coordinating his operation with Saddam Hussein's regime? The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence asserts that "the Iraqi regime 'certainly' had knowledge that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi...was operating in Baghdad and northern Iraq." 9

What emerges from these intelligence details is that Iraq had an ongoing and cooperative relationship with al-Qaeda that intensified after 2001. The Butler Committee even added: "some reports also suggest that Iraq may have trained some al-Qaeda terrorists since 1998." True, there is no persuasive evidence available to link Iraq to the 9/11 attacks. But there were grounds for concern that if Iraq continued along the same path, expertise in weapons of mass destruction might have been provided to al-Qaeda.

David Kay, who headed the Iraq Survey Group looking for Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, announced in October 2003 that he had not yet found prohibited weaponry. However, in early 2004 he appeared on FOX Television and concluded: "We know there were terrorist groups in state [Iraq] still seeking WMD capability. Iraq, although I found no weapons, had tremendous capabilities in this area. A marketplace phenomenon was about to occur, if it did not occur; sellers meeting buyers. And I think that would have been dangerous if the war had not intervened." 10

The Senate report added another important element to this observation: "The Central Intelligence Agency's judgment that Saddam Hussein, if sufficiently desperate, might employ terrorists with a global reach - al-Qaeda - to conduct terrorist attacks in the event of war, was reasonable. No information has emerged thus far to suggest that Saddam did try to employ al-Qaeda in conducting terrorist attacks."

Saudi Backing of al-Qaeda

Another issue being examined as a result of the 9/11 Commission is the Saudi tie to terrorism. In mid-June, Qorvis Communications put out a press release on behalf of the Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia that led with the sentence: "The 9-11 Commission confirmed today that it has found no evidence that the government of Saudi Arabia funded al-Qaeda."

Writing in the New York Times two days later, Douglas Jehl also reported that "the staff of the Sept. 11 commission has put forward what amounts to a major revision of a widely held perception in Washington that top Saudi officials gave money to al-Qaeda." 11 ANew York Times editorial said on June 28: "The independent commission on 9/11 recently concluded that al-Qaeda got no financial support from Saudi Arabia's government." 12 The "no evidence of Saudi funding of al-Qaeda" was subsequently carried by other leading U.S. newspapers.

This rendition is close, but not identical, to what appears in the 9/11 Commission report. It states: "Saudi Arabia has long been considered the primary source of al-Qaeda funding, but we have found no evidence that the Saudi government as an institution [emphasis added] or senior Saudi officials individually funded the organization." The report then adds a huge caveat: "This conclusion does not exclude the likelihood that charities with significant government sponsorship diverted funds to al-Qaeda."

Elsewhere in the report, it explains that Saudi international relief agencies, like the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY), are regulated by the Ministry of Islamic Affairs of the Saudi Arabian government. The ministry uses Saudi government funds to spread Wahhabi beliefs around the world through such agencies. The 9/11 Commission explains that these "Wahhabi-funded organizations" have been used to further the goal of "violent jihad against non-Muslims." It mentions charity organizations like al-Haramain that employed al-Qaeda sympathizers. It also discloses that another charity, al-Wafa, "wittingly participated in funneling money to al-Qaeda." The report confirms that "al-Qaeda found fertile fund-raising ground in Saudi Arabia." It was noteworthy that the 9/11 Commission reported that Iran tried to strengthen relations with al-Qaeda after October 2000, "but was rebuffed because bin Laden did not want to alienate his supporters in Saudi Arabia."

It is wrong to conclude that the 9/11 Commission let Saudi Arabia off the hook. One of the classic arguments of Saudi apologists is that Osama bin Laden picked Saudis to be the largest component of the terrorist cell in the 9/11 attacks in order to drive a wedge between the U.S. and the Saudi government. The 9/11 Commission report contains details of a U.S. interrogation of Khallad Sheikh Muhammad (KSM), the mastermind of the attack. KSM explained "that Saudis comprised the largest portion of the pools of recruits in the al-Qaeda training camps." According to his estimates, 70 percent of the trainees in any given camp were Saudi nationals. Saudis were easier to get past U.S. immigration, as well.

But clearly something was very wrong in the Saudi educational system that caused so many Saudis to become adherents to al-Qaeda's anti-Western jihad. The 9/11 Commission asserts that many of the Saudis in the 9/11 attack were recruited by al-Qaeda inside of Saudi Arabia itself! Saudi sheikhs sent candidates to Afghanistan for training. One Saudi mosque is described in the report as a "terrorist factory."

The debate over 9/11 intelligence ultimately involves a question of the degree of proof that observers expect in order to determine whether certain relationships exist. Do analysts expect a written "memorandum of understanding" between Iraq and al-Qaeda in order to establish that a cooperative relationship existed? Aren't the provision of a safe haven to al-Qaeda and reports of Iraqi training of its operatives a sufficient source of concern?

Similarly, is it necessary to produce a check signed by a senior Saudi official to an al-Qaeda operative in order to prove Saudi financial backing of the organization? Doesn't the movement of funds to al-Qaeda from charities financed and monitored by the Saudi government raise serious questions about Riyadh's past role in the growth of the new terrorism?

Writing in the Wall Street Journal on the 9/11 Commission, Charles Hill, a former aide to Secretaries of State George Shultz and Henry Kissinger, has aptly noted that "the demand for near-perfect certainty is a deeply entrenched delusion." 13 Saddam Hussein's Iraq was a tightly-controlled totalitarian society with a strong domestic counter-intelligence arm. North Korea is probably very similar. Unless realistic expectations are established about the degree of proof that intelligence has to provide to the citizens of democracies, the war on terrorism will be difficult to pursue. Warning signs of future attacks may be ignored by agencies feeling insecure about the specificity of the evidence they have in hand, which is necessary to produce a change in policy or even a military response.
* * *

Notes

1. Philip Shenon, "Correcting the Record on Sept. 11, in Great Detail," New York Times, 25 July 2004; http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/25/national/25PANE.html?hp.
2. Philip Shenon and Christopher Marquis, "Panel Finds No Qaeda-Iraq Tie; Describes a Wider Plot for 9/11," New York Times, 17 June 2004; http://www.heraldtribune.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?Date=20040617&
Category=ZNYT02&ArtNo=406170800&SectionCat=&Template=printart.
3. Richard A. Clarke, "Honorable Commission, Toothless Report," New York Times, 25 July 2004; http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/25/opinion/25clar.html.
4. Stephen F. Hayes, "Findings on Iraq and al-Qaeda in the Final Report of the 9/11 Commission," Weekly Standard, 2 August 2004; http://weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/004/357lnryy.asp.
5. William Kristol, "Did al-Qaeda and Iraq have a 'Collaborative Relationship'?" Weekly Standard, 26 July 2004; http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/004/327igxby.asp.
6. Gideon Alon, "MI Official: Iran May Give WMDs to Hizballah," Ha'aretz, July 20, 2004; http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/453479.html.
7. Stephen F. Hayes, The Connection: How al-Qaeda's Collaboration with Saddam Hussein has Endangered America (New York: Harper Collins, 2004).
8. Stephen F. Hayes, "The Missing Link: What the Senate Report Really Says About Iraq and al-Qaeda," Weekly Standard, 26 July 2004; http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/004/339finwc.asp.
9. Daniel McKivergan, "9/11 Commission Confirms Iraq/al-Qaeda Ties," Weekly Standard, 22 July 2004; http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/004/354tdeij.asp.
10. "Interview with David Kay," FOX News Sunday, Feb. 1, 2004; http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,110091,00.html.
11. Douglas Jehl, "No Saudi Payment to Qaeda is Found," New York Times, 18 June 2004; http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article6343.htm.
12. "Saudis in Terror's Shadow," Editorial, New York Times, 28 June 2004; http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/28/opinion/28MON1.html.
13. Charles Hill, "Commissionism," Wall Street Journal, 23 July 2004.
* * *

Dore Gold is the President of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. He is the author of Hatred's Kingdom: How Saudi Arabia Supports the New Global Terrorism (Regnery, 2003), and Tower of Babble: How the United Nations Has Fueled Global Chaos (New York: Crown Forum, forthcoming November 2004).

Back to Top
------------------------------------------------------------------------

The 9/11 Vision

By Michael A. Ledeen

National Review Online, Publication Date: July 23, 2004

Better, but not there yet.

Well, it's better than the Intelligence Committee thing, anyway. You can actually read this one, sometimes with pleasure, which is a rarity for documents of the genre. And it's got lots of information, some of which is a mystery.

To start with, this commission is explicit about Iran's ongoing intimate relationship with al Qaeda. We know--and the report confirms--that Iran was up to its neck in the Khobar Towers bombing in 1996 in Saudi Arabia, and the report cryptically adds "there are also signs that al Qaeda played some role, as yet unknown." But the relationship goes back a good five years, as Sudan brokered an agreement whereby Iran would train al Qaeda terrorists for operations against Israel and the United States. This training took place first in Iran, and, in the fall of 1993, in the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon.

For those of us who have long argued that Iran, and Iranian-sponsored Hezbollah, provided much of the operational inspiration for Osama, it is gratifying to find forthright statements like "Bin Ladin reportedly showed particular interest in learning how to use truck bombs such as the one that had killed 241 U.S. Marines in Lebanon in 1983. The relationship between al Qaeda and Iran demonstrated that Sunni-Shia divisions did not necessarily pose an insurmountable barrier to cooperation in terrorist operations...al Qaeda contacts with Iran continued for many years."

The unsealed indictment of Osama bin Laden in the fall of 1998 charged that al Qaeda had allied itself with Iran, Sudan, and Hezbollah, and--as we learn for the first time from the report--that there was an "understanding" between al Qaeda and Iraq, promising that al Qaeda would not attack Iraq and that the two sides would cooperate on various things, including weapons development. Richard Clarke suspected that chemical-weapons projects in Sudan were the result of that agreement.

Recent leaks had already announced the commission's conclusion that many of the 9/11 terrorists had received favored treatment from Iranian border guards--by granting them safe passage and declining to stamp their passports--but the leaks were incomplete. In October 2000, we are told, a senior Hezbollah terrorist went to Saudi Arabia and "planned to assist individuals in Saudi Arabia in traveling to Iran during November. . . . In mid-November, we believe, three of the future muscle hijackers . . . traveled in a group from Saudi Arabia to Beirut and then onward to Iran. An associate of a senior Hezbollah operative was on the same flight . . . the travel of this group was important enough to merit the attention of senior figures in Hezbollah." And it goes on and on: "Later in November, two future muscle hijackers . . . flew into Iran from Bahrain. In February 2001, Khalid al Mihdhar may have taken a flight from Syria to Iran, and then traveled further within Iran to a point near the Afghan border."

And there is another bombshell, quietly buried on page 149: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's family lived in Iran for a while in the mid-90s, and KSM himself spent time there as well.

All of this might lead a normal person to conclude the obvious: that Iran was helpful to the 9/11 conspiracy. But no, not really. First of all, the Hezbollah attention to the travelers might have been coincidental; they might have been tracking a different group. And despite the considerable evidence, the commission resorts to the usual CIA CYA language in such matters: "We have found no evidence that Iran or Hezbollah was aware of the planning for what later became the 9/11 attack."

Pfui.

I remember, back in the Eighties, an Arab terrorist flew from Damascus to Istanbul, and went directly to the synagogue there, where he killed many people. When some of us suggested we might find some appropriately mean thing to do to the Syrians, CIA was quick to say that there was no hard evidence linking the Syrian regime to the terrorist attack. By which they meant that we did not have either a tape recording of a conversation in which old man Assad authorized the attack, or a signed affidavit from the Syrian government admitting guilt.

In the real world, it's very rare, verging on impossible, to have such "intelligence" or "evidence." The commission piled up an impressive quantity of it--I should think quite enough to justify Iran's status as charter member in the Axis of Evil, and more than enough to compel deputy secretary of State Armitage to change his tune on the "democratic" nature of the mullahcracy.

So what's the mystery? The mystery is where did the information come from about Iran training al Qaeda terrorists over a long period of time? I don't think that CIA believes that. Yet CIA is presumably the source. Ah, well, as the commission says, "this topic requires further investigation by the U.S. government." Don't hold your breath.

The weakest part of the report concerns what needs to be done to destroy the terror masters. The whole section is written as if the state sponsors were somehow beside the point; the commission focus is entirely on the terrorist groups. This is an odd position, given all the evidence of the deep involvement of countries like Iran, Syria, and Iraq.

It's downhill from there. In a rambling discussion of our many intelligence failures over the years, the commission pretends to criticize Congress, but then only discusses sins of omission--insufficient oversight. Yes, the report mentions the scandals in the 70s, and if you read very carefully you will find clever language that credits Attorney General Levi with drafting guidelines for the FBI that avoided even greater damage (talk about damning with faint praise). But the report fails to make the basic point that Congress had defanged the FBI and CIA. And there is no explicit recommendation that the old strictures be abolished, maybe because many of them have, thanks to the Patriot Act, but that is really not good enough.

The commission has actually come up with an oversight scheme that would almost certainly make things even worse than they have been. They want new oversight committees, with "bipartisan staff" (presumably selected by the Archangel Michael, because nobody in Washington is capable of such an act), bigger budgets, and unlimited tenure. This is a guarantee of corruption. Elected officials with open-ended terms will invariably end up in the pockets of the intelligence community. The best hope for honest congressional criticism is short tenure and revolving staff.

Worse still, the report calls for even more money for intelligence, and an entirely new layer of bureaucracy, the effect of which would be far greater centralization of the whole process.

I think this gets the problem backwards. We need a smaller intelligence community, not a bigger one, because bigger means more homogenized. The Senate Intelligence Committee report complained about "group think," which is the inevitable outcome of a big community that has to agree on final language for finished intelligence. It would be far better, in my opinion, to let real specialists tell the policymakers what they think, and sign their names to their conclusions. That way, if an analyst successfully solved a problem, he could be rewarded. As things stand now--and the matter is even worse if the commission's recommendations are adopted--no one can be rewarded for original thinking, and bad analysis gets blamed on the whole organization.

In short, we should strive for competitive intelligence. Keep the boxes small, let them present their analyses and recommendations, and make the policymakers sort it out. The commission goes through the ritual pieties of keeping policy and analysis separate, but most of such talk is misleading, since every grownup knows that certain conclusions--say, that Iran supported the 9/11 operation--lead inevitably to certain policies--say, that "selective dialogue with Iran" is a joke.

Everyone in Washington is making policy all the time. Live with it.

Other really big problems--above all, the need for a new generation of spies capable of penetrating the terror network--are finessed by calling for future leaders to solve the problems within the proposed context. But, as Reuel Gerecht has long taught us, no bureaucratic fix can possibly undo the terrible damage wrought by more than 30 years of restrictions and the consequent culture of risk avoidance and long-distance spy craft.

Oh, and by the way--as Angleton would be the first to observe--there's hardly a word in here about counterintelligence. If you're going to centralize things even more, it makes it easier for our enemies to penetrate the structure and get...damn near everything. So the commission's scheme cries out for better counterintelligence. If intelligence is going to be across-the-government, well, then, I'm afraid counterintelligence will have to be expanded and improved as well.

At the end of the day, we need officials who are good enough to make the hard decisions, authorize risky actions, listen carefully to dissonance among the analysts and disagreement about proposed operations, and manage the whole thing while protecting civil liberties to the utmost. It won't be easy. If and when our guys get to that point, the structural changes they need to actuate are actually quite simple: They need a big-time purge, what the business world called "restructuring," leading to a smaller, leaner intelligence community where individuals are encouraged to think independently and act courageously.

It's leadership, stupid.

Michael A. Ledeen is a resident scholar in the Freedom Chair at AEI.

Back to Top