America still vulnerable

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The voluminous 9-11 Commission report chronicles the missteps across government that preceded the deadliest attack in this nation's history. It's an urgent call to reform the way our nation gathers and disseminates intelligence. We remain woefully unprepared to fight a previously underestimated enemy who is smart, patient, versatile and unpredictable.

Appropriately, the report, authored over 19 months by a bipartisan committee, avoids finger-pointing. But it offers a sobering assessment of our intelligence community — the chronic failings and crippling limitations of agencies built to spy on Cold War enemies. The report shows how communications gaffes, poor management and a fatally misplaced arrogance prevented us from assigning the appropriate urgency to the gathering threat that al-Qaida represented.

But there were failures at the very top, too. The report concludes that the past two administrations did not make terrorism enough of a priority and failed to provide a sufficient response to terrorist aggression as war was waged against the United States a decade prior to 9-11. The 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, the 1998 attacks on two U.S. embassies in Africa and the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole were met with ineffective diplomatic and military responses that allowed al-Qaida to flourish.

Terrorists still "seek creative methods to kill Americans in limitless numbers," the report says. That's not surprising. Ominously, the report says an attack equal to or greater than the one of nearly three years ago is possible, if not probable. That is a call to action.

The committee recommends a more streamlined and nimble intelligence body, one with more direct accountability to the White House and under a single appointee charged with overseeing all 15 agencies responsible for intelligence gathering. It would require a historic shift in our intelligence operations, starting first with some consolidations among the CIA, FBI and National Security Agency. It's indeed a groundbreaking shift. But it's at least worthy of debate, because the report makes clear how interagency rivalries and diffused accountability worked against cooperation.

Not all of the news was bad. The reforms following 9-11 have fostered far more information sharing between agencies than in the past. And with the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, an apparatus exists now where none had for disseminating vital information to those federal, state and local authorities that patrol our borders and protect targets inviting to terrorists.

However, our intelligence failures "of imagination, policy, capabilities, and management" cited in the report must be corrected. It means remaking our intelligence agencies to reflect the greatest threat to national security, which is clearly international terrorism. As recently as three years ago, that wasn't apparent when it should have been.

Election season almost guarantees that nothing will be done until after November. But Congress should heed this call to action, seriously weigh the committee's recommendations and reform our intelligence agencies.