WASHINGTON — Leaders of the House and Senate intelligence committees formally announced plans Thursday to conduct a joint inquiry of the intelligence failures surrounding the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
The lawmakers tapped L. Britt Snider, former inspector general at the CIA and onetime aide to CIA Director George J. Tenet, to oversee a staff of investigators who will spend much of the next year, if not longer, investigating what went wrong and why.
Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said that the bicameral arrangement is unprecedented and that the scope of the inquiry will be extensive, with plans to examine the intelligence community's response to terrorist threats dating back to the 1980s.
The joint committee will spend the next few months gathering documents from agencies and testimony from intelligence officials, with public hearings possible as early as April, Graham said.
"The purpose of this inquiry is to ascertain why the intelligence community did not learn of the Sept. 11 attacks in advance," Graham said. "We owe this to the 3,000 who died, their families and the rest of America."
The announcement marks the official opening of an inquiry that lawmakers began discussing almost immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks but were reluctant to begin in the midst of the war in Afghanistan.
Snider, who retired from the CIA last year, is a veteran of intelligence investigations dating back to the landmark Church Committee hearings in the 1970s that probed CIA spying on American citizens.
Critics complained that Snider is too close to Tenet to be objective. Snider previously served as special counsel to Tenet at the CIA and was general counsel to the Senate Intelligence Committee when Tenet was its staff director in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Snider's selection "sets the stage for a whitewash," warned the Center for Security Policy, a right-wing organization run by Frank J. Gaffney, a Pentagon official during the Reagan administration.
Sen. Richard C. Shelby of Alabama, the ranking Republican on the intelligence committee, said he and others had raised questions about Snider's selection but ultimately agreed with his appointment.
The investigation was announced by the ranking members of the intelligence panels in both chambers, including Graham and Shelby in the Senate and Reps. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.) and Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) in the House.
