Two intelligence failures may eventually set us up for third

WASHINGTON — Bob Graham isn’t running for anything.

Not for president. The Florida Democrat briefly sought his party’s nomination but dropped out before even the most serious Iowans got serious about the race.

Not for the Senate. Graham abandoned his bid for re-election — he was considered a shoo-in — soon after he gave up on the presidency.

Graham has plenty of time on his hands. And he has plenty on his mind.

He is the former top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee and what occupies his thoughts these days is why the United States has suffered not one but two serious "intelligence failures" and still has made no serious effort to redress them.

"If 9/11 was not an event sufficient to jolt the status quo, what is it going to take?" Graham asked in an interview.

This is what he does now instead of running for office: He talks to anyone who might have a passing interest in questioning why the intelligence failure of Sept. 11, 2001, was followed by an intelligence failure in Iraq. And in the case of Iraq, was it a politically fraudulent use of intelligence?

Either way, Graham is stunned that the president continues to say he has "great confidence" in the intelligence community. Graham may be the only person in Washington willing to ask the obvious.

"How can he have great confidence in our intelligence community after it has been proven confused before September 11 and completely wrong on the threat posed by Iraq?" the senator asked in a recent floor speech.

Good question. No answers.

Even now, Graham points out, there’s been little progress on the 19 recommendations made by the joint congressional committee that studied the intelligence failures before the 9/11 attacks. The panel was bipartisan and bicameral — an extraordinary inquiry into an extraordinary event. Few of its suggestions have been implemented. A crucial one, the naming of a national intelligence officer for terrorism, has been ignored.

The goal was to have an individual unaffiliated with any of the intelligence agencies sift through all the information and assess it. The point was to ensure that institutional loyalty and the covering of backsides that so often accompanies it would be kept to a minimum. Lessons, Graham complains, have not been learned.

If 9/11 was a wake-up call, then the war in Iraq, he says, is a report card. "The report card would have an F on it and after the F would be a minus," he says.

No one has been fired. President George W. Bush is well satisfied with the very people who have now failed twice.

"They may feel that the people that need to be sanctioned or fired would be more dangerous to them in the civilian world than if they are continuing to serve in the political world," Graham said. "People talk."

Still, Bush has just named his very own panel to investigate the intelligence shortcomings involving Iraq. Won’t that help?

"I’d say my expectations are low," Graham said.

The commission was hand-picked by the president. It is unclear whether it will probe the matter of whether Bush and other top officials manipulated intelligence to make their case for war. And, Graham said, it simply lacks the authority to do a credible job.

"It doesn’t have some of the powers we found necessary," he said, referring to the joint congressional inquiry. "Such as, it doesn’t have the subpoena power."

There is nothing like the threat of subpoena to entice a squeamish witness to talk or a reluctant bureaucrat to overcome institutional inertia. The independent commission probing 9/11 has issued three subpoenas and threatened more. The joint inquiry of which Graham was a member twice was forced to seek federal court intervention to prod the Bush Justice Department into producing information it sought.

Graham, who warned that al-Qaida was the gravest threat to the nation and so voted against the Iraq War, notes that the terrorist group has reorganized itself with a command structure that relies on regional alliances around the globe. Are we safer now?

No one can say. But it can reasonably be assumed that our failure to rectify the first two intelligence failures sets us up, eventually, for a third.

Marie Cocco is a Newsday columnist. Contact her by writing to cocco@newsday.com.