Opinion: Too serious for posturing

The partisan sniping over who knew what prior to Sept. 11 distracts Washington from the deadly serious business of preventing future terrorist attacks against our country. Democrats need to avoid reckless accusations that the Bush administration ignored clear evidence of al-Qaida's plots. The flaws in our intelligence system developed under Democratic and Republican presidents alike. At the same time, the Bush administration can't afford to be defensive about the need for a thorough investigation into the intelligence failures that allowed the Sept. 11 attacks to succeed. Only by assessing those failures with a critical eye can we make the reforms needed to defend ourselves against the future terror attacks that Washington officials acknowledge are inevitable.

Fortunately, the rhetoric on both sides already has been toned down a notch since last week. Only a handful of conspiracy theorists persist in suggesting that President Bush and other top White House officials knew, or should have known, that terrorists intended to hijack commercial airplanes and turn them into weapons of mass destruction. Instead, responsible officials in both parties are focusing on specific failures of communication and organization that prevented our government from piecing together unconnected threads of information that hinted at the grave threat posed by al-Qaida.

Meanwhile, top Bush administration officials are backing away from their efforts to discourage a serious review of our pre-Sept. 11 intelligence failures. Last week, Vice President Dick Cheney tried to silence Democratic lawmakers who raised legitimate questions about the Aug. 6 presidential briefing paper warning of terrorist hijackings. Sunday, Cheney acknowledged "there's no question that there were failures" and said he had no objection to a congressional inquiry intended to improve our antiterrorism apparatus.

For now, the appropriate vehicle for such a review is the joint congressional investigation being led by Floridians Sen. Bob Graham, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and Rep. Porter Goss, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. Democrat Graham and Republican Goss are mature, intelligent lawmakers with a positive working relationship that transcends partisanship, and their committee is capable of developing a thorough and credible report. If the vice president was sincere in his support for a bipartisan review, he and the president will see to it that executive-branch agencies provide the Graham-Goss committee all the information it needs to complete its task. Graham, Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., and some other committee members say the White House, FBI, CIA and other elements of national intelligence have not been sufficiently cooperative so far.

Still, calls for a broader outside inquiry are premature at best, and politically motivated at worst. For example, Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., says an independent commission is needed to determine why the government ignored "neon signs flashing" that a terrorist attack was imminent. Such rhetoric from Lieberman, who was Al Gore's running mate in 2000 and would like to run for president in 2004, distorts an issue that is much too serious for partisan posturing. Most voters will be able to see through Republican efforts to profit politically from the president's post-Sept. 11 popularity, or Democratic efforts to exploit past intelligence failures for partisan gain. In this time of national crisis, they are looking for leaders who unequivocally put the security of the American people above any personal or partisan ambitions.

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