CIA Whitewash
No way to run an investigation.

Frank J. Gaffney Jr. held senior positions in the Reagan Defense Department. He is currently the president of the Center for Security Policy.
February 14, 2002 9:10 a.m.

o much for a rigorous review of the policy and other failures that contributed to the U.S. intelligence community's inability to detect and prevent the deadly attacks of September 11. No sooner had members of the House and Senate intelligence committees decided that these problems required a comprehensive review — a review that would almost certainly implicate CIA Director George Tenet for his role in implementing defective policies, if not in every case initiating them — than they turned over its conduct to one of Tenet's most trusted subordinates: L. Britt Snyder.

This personnel decision sets the stage for a whitewash of epic proportions — as if Sen. Sam Ervin had hired John Erlichman to run the Watergate investigation or Ken Lay's general counsel were tapped to run all the congressional investigations into the Enron debacle.

These invidious comparisons are hardly exaggerations. Britt Snyder was, until last year, the inspector general of the Tenet CIA. From 1997-98 he served as special counsel and adviser to Tenet. From 1989 to 1992, he was general counsel of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence when Tenet was its staff director. It is hard to imagine how such an individual could bring the sort of independence and objectivity to the task that the committee so clearly requires.

It is, moreover, unclear at this writing whether Snyder will be allowed to hire the rest of the staff charged with conducting this investigation. If so, it is entirely possible that none of those retained will be able or willing to find fault with the intelligence community's past direction, priorities, or conduct — let alone that of the elected and appointed officials whose political and policy proclivities appear to have contributed to the Sept. 11 failure.

If the House and Senate intelligence committees are determined to give a complete pass to George Tenet and the direction he gave the community over the past five years, they might as well spare the taxpayer the expense of going through the motions of an investigation. If, on the other hand, they really do want to learn and apply the lessons of Sept. 11, they would be well advised to secure the services of those who have at least as much expertise in the field of intelligence as Snyder, but not his disabling baggage of past institutional and personal loyalties.