The Week of Living Dangerously

Americans have been told often enough that post-9/11, they have to learn to live with insecurity. But last week it seemed that everyone was conspiring to terrify them out of their wits. While the President was heading toward a war with one reclusive dictator with a thirst for nuclear weapons, another one popped up in North Korea bragging that he was secretly acquiring all that and much worse. While the area around the nation's capital was being terrorized by a murderous sniper, police were forced to admit that all their best clues - the description of the van, the shooter, the gun - were worthless. Then the Director of Central Intelligence told a Congressional committee that in effect, all the national effort to combat Al Qaeda over the last year had left the country in as much danger of internal attack as before the destruction of the World Trade Center.

George Tenet, the CIA director, made a long-awaited appearance before a Congressional committee that is investigating, among other things, his agency's performance in the period leading up to Sept. 11. Mr. Tenet was vigorously defensive. But while his testimony may have heartened the agency's much-criticized work force, it was less than comforting for the rest of us.

Basically, Mr. Tenet's message was that the nation's intelligence forces did all they could before the attack, which happened anyway. Now they have greatly expanded their counterterrorism efforts, but that has not led to any reduction in the level of danger. In fact, all the efforts at home and abroad to strike down Al Qaeda have created a splintered group that is just as lethal as the original. "The threat environment we find ourselves in today is as bad as it was last summer, the summer before Sept. 11", Mr. Tenet said in testimony that stunned many in Washington. "It is serious, they've reconstituted, they are coming after us, they want to execute attacks."

This is not the first time that the public has had to digest this sort of information from federal officials and wondered what in the world to do with it. Should everyone move to Montana? Throw out the incumbent in November, whoever he or she is? Is Mr. Tenet doing us a service by being frank, or is he trying to protect an agency that failed to warn us about the previous attack by issuing an all-purpose warning now?

One of the jobs of the CIA director is to be a sort of town crier on national security. Although American intelligence agencies and the FBI failed to connect the dots before the terrorist attack, Mr. Tenet himself had made some fairly direct public statements warning about the danger. He failed, however, to get the attention of his bosses in the Bush administration, and he must have blamed himself for not being louder. Last week, there was no danger that anybody missed the message. But he is far from the only high-ranking official who feels that these days the safest route is to issue as spine-chilling a forecast as possible. Nobody in Washington, or anywhere else, knows what might happen next. So nobody wants to be in a position of criticizing anyone who appears, on the surface, to be hyperventilating in public. We know all too well that the worst might easily happen.

These are the other things we know. Congress has left town without approving the homeland security bill. Although this particular failure has many parents, the Bush administration's insistence on tying the plan to an ideological attack on job security for the new department's unionized employees is the biggest stumbling block. We know that the Immigration and Naturalization Service is still a mess. We know that while the President has every right to be concerned about the threat of Iraq, the administration's suggestion earlier this year that it had Al Qaeda on the run was, to say the least, premature. Before we begin any risky foreign initiative, the country needs a good deal of reassurance that our priorities are in order, and that Mr. Bush is not being seduced into focusing on the one enemy who is not only evil but easy to target.