Of all the characteristics that the Bush administration has consistently displayed, hiding key information from the public is one of its more undemocratic. It’s no longer surprising, but it remains terribly disturbing.
In the latest example, a CIA report on pre-9/11 intelligence is apparently complete, but the administration is keeping it under lock and key. All indications are that the confidentiality has little do with classified information and everything to do with information that may prove embarrassing to Bush before the election.
The ranking members of the House Intelligence Committee have asked the CIA to turn over an internal report on whether agency employees should be held accountable for intelligence failures leading up to the Sept. 11 attacks, congressional officials said Tuesday.
The CIA has not responded to the request, raising concerns among some Democrats in Congress that the report is being withheld to avoid embarrassment for the Bush administration in the final weeks before the presidential election.
The report was drafted in response to a demand from Congress nearly two years ago for the CIA to conduct an internal inquiry into the performance of agency personnel before the attacks. The agency was asked “to determine whether and to what extent personnel at all levels should be held accountable” for intelligence breakdowns cataloged in a joint congressional investigation of Sept. 11.
No agency employee has been fired or faced other disciplinary measures in connection with Sept. 11 inquiries, a fact that has frustrated critics of the CIA and relatives of those who were killed in the attacks.
It’s not just the public; Congress, despite asking for the report in the first place, isn’t allowed to see it either. Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.), ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, said, “We believe that the CIA has been told not to distribute the report. We are very concerned.”
I think we all should be.
This is a rare instance in which a newspaper columnist gets a scoop before a beat reporter does. In this case, the LA Times’ Robert Scheer broke the story yesterday.
It is shocking: The Bush administration is suppressing a CIA report on 9/11 until after the election, and this one names names. Although the report by the inspector general’s office of the CIA was completed in June, it has not been made available to the congressional intelligence committees that mandated the study almost two years ago.
“It is infuriating that a report which shows that high-level people were not doing their jobs in a satisfactory manner before 9/11 is being suppressed,” an intelligence official who has read the report told me, adding that “the report is potentially very embarrassing for the administration, because it makes it look like they weren’t interested in terrorism before 9/11, or in holding people in the government responsible afterward.”
An intelligence official told Scheer that top CIA leaders — including acting CIA Director John McLaughlin and incoming Director Porter Goss — have intentionally “stalled” the report.
Given the described content, it’s not surprising the administration would want to keep this information hidden.
The official stressed that the report was more blunt and more specific than the earlier bipartisan reports produced by the Bush-appointed Sept. 11 commission and Congress.
“What all the other reports on 9/11 did not do is point the finger at individuals, and give the how and what of their responsibility. This report does that,” said the intelligence official. “The report found very senior-level officials responsible.”
By law, the only legitimate reason the CIA director has for holding back such a report is national security. Yet neither Goss nor McLaughlin has invoked national security as an explanation for not delivering the report to Congress.
“It surely does not involve issues of national security,” said the intelligence official.
“The agency directorate is basically sitting on the report until after the election,” the official continued. “No previous director of CIA has ever tried to stop the inspector general from releasing a report to the Congress, in this case a report requested by Congress.”
Keep an eye on this one; it may get interesting.