CIA should release the new 9/11 report

Miami Herald: Close to four years after the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the inspector general of the CIA has finally finished a report on how that agency performed before the disaster. The secret report has been sent to Congress, which is considering whether to make the report public, and how much to hold back if it does. The decision should favor declassifying as much of the report as possible and releasing it without undue delay.
The 9/11 attacks are rightly considered by many Americans as a great failure of intelligence. In fact, we now know that there were failures at many levels -- political, military and in the field of intelligence -- going back well over a decade.
In its 567-page report, the 9/11 Commission last year covered many of these areas, but it focused on finding out what happened and how to impede future attacks. "Our aim has not been to assign individual blame," members of the commission declared.
Thus, the record of how the agency at the very center of the fight against terrorism before 9/11 went about its work remains largely unknown. The more that is put on the record, the more that the public will know about exactly what happened. It has taken an inordinately long time for the Central Intelligence Agency's I.G. to issue the report, but the passage of time has only increased the questions and doubts over the CIA's performance.
Individual accountability
That's why Congress asked for the investigation in the first place. Leaders of the families of the 9/11 victims repeatedly demanded individual accountability. To the extent that this report can satisfy their understandable need for answers, it supplies information that should be made available to all Americans.
Leaks of the report have suggested that former CIA Director George Tenet comes in for sharp criticism for his alleged failure to develop a solid plan to overcome al-Qaeda. Tenet, who retired last year after seven years as head of the CIA, is the person primarily responsible for the agency's performance, but he, above all, should be in favor of releasing a public version of the report, if only to set the record straight.
For those still in the agency, the CIA should heed a reported recommendation that it set up "accountability boards" to deal with individual failures.