Groups, lawmakers seek public version of CIA accountability report
Long-awaited results of IG investigation sent to Congress this week said to highlight failures by senior managers.
Calls mounted this week for the CIA to produce a public version of a classified report detailing the actions of senior agency officials prior to the Sept. 11 attacks.
The CIA's inspector general delivered a long-awaited report to Congress Tuesday describing problems at the agency before the 9/11 attacks and naming individuals who bear most of the responsibility. The report was delivered to the House and Senate intelligence committees.
The report remains classified, but advocacy organizations and some lawmakers say they want the CIA to release a public version. The CIA had no comment Friday on the report or whether the agency would try to produce a public version.
A spokesman for Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif., said she "absolutely" wants the CIA to issue a declassified version of the report. Harman is the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee.
"I know that she and the other committee members … will insist on a declassified version so the families can see what happened," the spokesman said.
A group known as the September 11 Advocates called for immediate release of the report. The group was founded by widows of victims and spearheaded a grass-roots effort to form the 9/11 commission, which investigated the attacks and made recommendations that ultimately led to an overhaul of the U.S. intelligence community.
"This report presumably discusses failures within the CIA and identifies performance deficiencies among high-ranking CIA officials. The findings in this report must be shared with all members of Congress and with the American public to ensure that the problems identified are addressed and corrected, thus moving to restore faith in this agency," the group said in a statement Thursday. "To shield CIA officials from accountability and to continue to cover up deficiencies in that agency puts the safety of our nation at risk. Four years post-9/11 this is truly unacceptable."
Another group, Families of September 11, also wants to see a public version of the report, as long as it does not disclose sensitive information, said the group's executive director, Jennifer Mincin. "It would be something that we would support," she said.
The inspector general's investigation was completed in June 2004 but was not included in the 9/11 commission's final report, which came out a month later. Philip Zelikow, the commission's executive director, told Government Executive that key staff members were briefed on the investigation, but made an agreement with the inspector general not to cite information from it in their final report.
Zelikow said commission staff members interviewed officials working on the inspector general's investigation and reviewed material from the probe. But he said it was not cited in the commission's final report because CIA personnel who were interviewed in the course of the investigation were not told the information they provided would end up in the final 9/11 report.
The commission has been criticized recently for omitting information about a Pentagon intelligence unit called Able Danger, which reportedly identified Mohamed Atta and other hijackers a year before the attacks.
The 9/11 commission's final report also did not identify failures of specific government officials, but concluded that governmentwide and institutional failures laid the groundwork for the attacks.
The inspector general's report, however, includes "detailed criticism of more than a dozen former and current agency officials, aiming its sharpest language at George J. Tenet," The New York Times reported Friday.
The investigation also criticizes James Pavitt, the agency's former deputy director of operations, and Cofer Black, former director of the agency's Counterterrorist Center, the paper reported.
It is not clear how long it might take to produce a declassified version of the CIA report. A similar report by the Justice Department's inspector general on FBI failures before 9/11 took more than a year to be released publicly. The report was finally issued in June after public pressure from advocacy organizations and lawmakers.
At one point, two senior members of the Senate Judiciary Committee--Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, and Patrick Leahy, D-Vt.--wrote a letter to FBI Director Robert Mueller and then-Attorney General John Ashcroft requesting that the report be declassified.
"While the needs of national security must be weighed seriously, we fear that the designation of information as classified in some cases serves to protect the executive branch against embarrassing revelations and full accountability," the senators wrote in a July 2004 letter.