Congressional Intelligence (If Any)

Wall Street Journal ^ | July 27, 2004 | Editorial

[OESY]

Congressional leaders are scrambling to treat the proposals of the 9/11 Commission as a matter of urgency, and are planning a special session next month to hold hearings. That in itself is no bad thing. The report has created a useful starting point for reform of the intelligence system, so let the debate begin.

On the other hand, let's not repeat Congress's usual mistake of rushing to act in pell-mell fashion so Members can tell voters they've "done" something. The biggest government security overhaul since the Truman Administration can't be done well in a month, or even several. A rush to legislation would also obscure one of the report's core insights: "Congressional oversight for intelligence -- and counterterrorism -- is dysfunctional." In other words, the Commission's most important message to Congress is, "First, heal thyself."

Congress and the intelligence agencies have been stuck in the same take-no-risks mode since the mid-1970s. That's when Senator Frank Church and his special committee jumped to the conclusion that the CIA was a "rogue elephant" based on isolated incidents from 10 to 20 years earlier. He got his famous photo-op holding aloft a poison-dart gun, while neglecting to mention that the gun had never been used and that it was the CIA itself that had brought it to the committee's attention.

The upshot was that four different oversight committees began to micromanage the intelligence agencies, signing off on individual covert operations. That led to a shift in funding away from human intelligence and toward electronic information-gathering. It also encouraged a culture of risk aversion in the agencies. This is surely one reason that the U.S. was unable to penetrate al Qaeda or the Taliban, and had no assets inside Iraq after the U.N. inspectors were expelled in the late 1990s. The best thing that could come out of the Commission's report would be a lot more humility from Congress, assuming that's possible.

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One risk of the current binge of political criticism over Iraq's WMD is that the CIA will become even more risk-averse in anticipating future threats.

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