The long-awaited inspector general's report on the performance of the CIA has arrived at Congress, more than two years after Congress demanded a review of the agency's performance prior to 9/11. The Intelligence Committees in both chambers will unseal the report and decide what information to declassify for wide dissemination, possibly as early as today:

Porter J. Goss, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, delivered a long-awaited internal report to Congress on Monday night that is said to give a harsh assessment of the agency's performance before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Mr. Goss, who was chairman of the House Intelligence Committee before his appointment last year as head of the C.I.A., hand-delivered two copies of the classified report to staff members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees.

The copies of the report, which is several hundred pages, were placed in committee safes and were not to be opened at least until Wednesday, said a Congressional official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak with the press on the record. ...

The draft report was described by intelligence officials in January as highly critical of George J. Tenet, the former C.I.A. director, and James L. Pavitt, the former deputy director for operations, both of whom retired last year. A spokesman for Mr. Tenet, Bill Harlow, and Mr. Pavitt both took issue with the reported findings in interviews at that time.

Mmebers of the committees will start working through the report soon, probably today, given the high profile of the material. Some may not get to it until later as they return from the summer recess. Senator Pat Roberts (R-KS), chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, has already indicated that the earliest he expects to address declassification will be next week when he returns to DC.

Congress should expedite this review. The pressing issues will be where the report coincides and contradicts the 9/11 Commission report findings, and especially whether that report reflects the full picture that the CIA had pre-9/11. The last two weeks have found several gaping holes in the 9/11 Commission narrative and report, including Able Danger and the arrests of Iraqi spies in Germany during the time that Mohammed Atta and two other 9/11 leaders traveled through and to there. Especially in the latter case, we need to know what actions the CIA took in determining the nature of the information it had and how it reported it back to the government.

Without a doubt, we need Congress to act quickly to bring confidence in our understanding of the actions and inactions that led to the success of the massive attacks by Islamofascist terrorists that day. That means that we need the entire data set, presented factually, and not just that which fits a predetermined narrative. Rather than passing this task off to a panel of unaccountable bureaucrats, Congress should take at least as much interest as it put into the ridiculously insipid issue of steroids in baseball and do its own investigation into the worst attack on American soil since the Civil War.

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Tracked on August 24, 2005 11:38 AM