Different hearings - and times

Today "the CIA doesn't have this negative association. It's just a question of did they do a good enough job," says Steven Kull of the University of Maryland's Program on International Policy Attitudes.

This week, pressed on why they had not moved to take out bin Laden, officials from the Bush and Clinton administrations cited a lack of "actionable intelligence," but - as emphatically - the lack of an "actionable" culture on Capitol Hill.

Former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke amplified the point in testimony this week. Many CIA senior managers, he said, had been "dragged up into this room and others and berated for failed covert action activities." The lesson that hit home was that "covert action is a very dangerous thing that can damage the CIA as much as it can damage the enemy," he added.

After the Church hearings, the burden of proof for US intelligence and defense analysts rose significantly. A culture of extreme caution set in, according to testimony and reports to the 9/11 commission this week.

"Whatever analysts might say privately, their written work was conservatively phrased and caveated. Evidence was catalogued in neutral detail," concludes a report by the 9/11 Commission staff released Tuesday. As a result, "the time lag between terrorist act and any definitive attribution grew to months, then years, as the evidence was compiled."

That caution in the intelligence agencies moved all the way up to the Cabinet level, officials testified. Before 9/11, "most people thought we had made up the issue of terrorism," said former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, responding to a question on why the US had not pushed for military action against Bin Laden.

In addition, intense criticism of President Clinton's 1998 strikes against al Qaeda training camps and the Shifa chemical plant in Sudan "made it more difficult to get approval for follow-up attacks on al Qaeda," writes Clarke in his new book, "Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror. A majority of Americans approved the attacks at the time, but they generated controversy nonetheless.

In parallel testimony this week, William Cohen and Donald Rumsfeld, Secretaries of Defense in the Clinton and Bush administrations, emphasized that there was no way to sustain military operations against bin Laden without the support of Congress, and, pre-9/11, that support was not at all likely. Had the Defense Department asked to invade Afghanistan, it would not have been taken seriously before 9/11, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told commissioners. Asked to comment on this point, Secretary Albright said, simply: "I agree."

Some experts worry that attitudes have swung too far from the era, not long ago, when presidential policy prohibited assassinations. But if this week's hearings are an indication, the mood is swinging away from caution. "We're back to plots to kill foreign leaders, and intelligence agencies are criticized if they are no aggressive enough in doing that," says Baker. "It's a cautionary tale to people in intelligence."

Page: 1 | 2