Investigators have shown that U.S. intelligence agencies mishandled years of accumulating evidence that al-Qaida was plotting an attack using airplanes.

Congressional investigators have detailed repeated warnings our government had received about the threat posed by al-Qaida before the Sept. 11 attacks, including the possibility that airplanes could be used as weapons. Eleanor Hill, the staff member in charge of the joint congressional investigation, says her investigators have uncovered no "smoking guns" that would have alerted the intelligence community with precision to the coming attack, but she says strong clues were missed.

The investigations into the intelligence failures preceding the Sept. 11 attacks should be forward-looking, seeking ways to correct past lapses so future threats can be prevented. No one should be narrowly focused on casting blame, because it already is clear that Democratic and Republican administrations, as well as congressional committees responsible for oversight of our intelligence operations, share blame for past failures. At the same time, no arm of government should be defensive or uncooperative as the fact-finding process goes forward. President Bush sent a positive signal Friday, when he said he now supports establishment of an independent commission to investigate the attacks. His position should encourage greater cooperation from executive-branch agencies that have not been eager to help Hill and her staff.

At least since the summer of 1998, after the bombings of two American embassies in East Africa, the CIA knew Osama bin Laden was a menace who was on a mission to harm American and Israeli interests. Information from numerous sources indicated bin Laden planned a spectacular attack in the United States. As early as August 1998, the intelligence community received word that a group of Arabs planned to fly a plane loaded with explosives into the World Trade Center. There were also warnings that al-Qaida planned to use commercial aircraft in its operations.

These repeated alarms should have led to tighter security at airports, a more coordinated system of screening visa applicants and an immediate check of suspicious activity at the nation's flight schools. Yet we now know that al-Qaida operatives took advantage of glaring security weaknesses in each of those areas.

George Tenet, who has served as CIA director since the Clinton administration, must have understood the gravity of the threat. In December 1998, he declared that we are at "war" with bin Laden. "I want no resource or people spared," he wrote.

Tenet's order did not lead to a serious re-allocation of resources. By 1999, the CIA had only three full-time analysts working on al-Qaida. Prior to Sept. 11, 2001, the FBI had only one, although other agents were assigned to analyze the threats of radical fundamentalists including al-Qaida.

With the amount of signal intelligence indicating bin Laden's intent to organize and train a terrorist network targeting the United States, a serious effort should have been made to obtain human intelligence and enlist more language specialists to analyze the intercepts. It was a national disgrace that the CIA and FBI had so few agents and analysts with relevant foreign language skills.

The reports make clear that the intelligence community already had the legal tools at its disposal to uncover a looming terrorist plot. Despite Attorney General John Ashcroft's allegations, the nation's civil liberties didn't stand in the way of uncovering al-Qaida's plans prior to Sept. 11. All the CIA and FBI had to do was respond effectively to the information they already had.

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