Henry Kissinger did the country a favor by backing out of the chairmanship of the independent commission charged with the duty of investigating the Sept. 11 attacks. The commission is only beginning its work, but the former secretary of state had already compromised its credibility. Kissinger, President Bush's first choice for chairman, has a history of secrecy and duplicity in the Nixon White House that made him a dubious choice to lead the panel. Those concerns were heightened by Kissinger's refusal to give a full public accounting of the current and former clients of his consulting business, some of which might be affected by the commission's work.

The president can begin to salvage the commission's credibility by choosing a new chairman who commands greater trust than Kissinger did. The makeup of the rest of the panel will be crucial also. The families of Sept. 11 victims pushed from the start for former Sen. Warren Rudman, R-N.H., to be included on the commission. Rudman, along with former Sen. Gary Hart, D-Colo., authored a prescient report warning of gaps in our defenses against terrorist attacks on American soil, and he is considered an independent thinker who is not swayed by partisan or institutional biases. Yet the White House and Senate Republicans have blocked him from the panel for those very reasons. Some congressional Democrats are equally reluctant to approve commission members who will be aggressive in investigating intelligence failures during the Clinton years. Unless Rudman or similarly independent experts are included on the panel, its work may be discredited from the start.

The controversy over Kissinger was symptomatic of broader obstacles to the type of investigation the American people deserve. Efforts to investigate the intelligence failures that preceded the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks are plagued by the same institutional secrecy and defensiveness that contributed to those failures in the first place. Organizational changes in the intelligence community will do little good unless they are accompanied by fundamental changes in the intelligence community's culture.

The joint congressional committee investigating the Sept. 11 attacks, which issued its report this week, appears to have carried out its duties in a responsible manner. Thanks to the collegial example set by its Florida leaders, Democratic Sen. Bob Graham and Republican Rep. Porter Goss, the committee generally avoided the partisan divisions that have wrecked previous congressional inquiries. Staff director Eleanor Hill and her investigators also earned high marks for their professionalism. However, several committee members and staff investigators complained that they received less than complete cooperation from the White House, the CIA, the FBI and other elements of the intelligence community.

Now the committee is wrangling with the Bush administration over what portions of its report will remain classified. The nation's interests will be poorly served if important findings are kept secret out of fears of embarrassment or political backlash rather than legitimate security concerns.

Meanwhile, Washington is attempting to digest the sweeping recommendations the panel has made public. The committee's most controversial proposal would create a Cabinet-level director of national intelligence who would outrank the CIA director and oversee the entire intelligence community. Washington officials need to explore whether that position would conflict with the new duties of the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, whose many responsibilities include serving as a clearinghouse for all the intelligence agencies. One way or the other, however, federal authorities should implement the changes necessary to end the budget fights and turf battles that historically have prevented more than a dozen intelligence agencies from working cooperatively.

While Washington debates the congressional panel's proposed reforms, there should be little disagreement over the panel's findings of fault prior to the Sept. 11 attacks. The committee concluded that our major intelligence agencies share blame for having "missed opportunities to disrupt the Sept. 11 plot by denying entry to or detaining would-be hijackers; to at least try to unravel the plot through surveillance and other investigative work within the United States; and . . . to generate a heightened state of alert and thus harden the homeland against attack."

The only committee dissenter was Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., who issued his own report singling out several officials, including CIA director George Tenet and former FBI director Louis Freeh, for their "failure . . . to work wholeheartedly to overcome the institutional and cultural obstacles to interagency cooperation . . ."

Shelby and other committee members had no serious differences over the nature of past failures and the need for specific reforms. Instead, they differ over the extent to which top Washington officials should be held personally responsible for those failures. In any case, their proposals will go nowhere as long as some Washington officials, from the White House down, continue to create institutional obstacles to honest oversight and reform.

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