Bush tries to blunt anger over intelligence failures

The Bush administration, as well as the lumbering apparatus of the US intelligence agencies, has been under extraordinary pressure for the past three weeks to explain its shortcomings before and after the 11 September attacks. Its response at every turn has been to try to seize the initiative and change the subject as quickly as possible.

Yesterday's sudden announcement of a wholesale reorganisation of America's national security agencies and the institution of a dedicated cabinet post to co-ordinate them was a clear attempt by a beleaguered administration to take back control of the news agenda, after a volley of leaks and counter-leaks from the CIA and FBI threatened to reduce the country's counter-terrorism efforts to ridicule.

The President, we were told, was embarking on the biggest government reorganisation since the onset of the Cold War, when many of the agencies were created.At least for a day, he could be sure national attention was focused on him – a day that otherwise might have been given over to the congressional testimony of Coleen Rowley, the FBI special agent from Minneapolis who lambasted her masters in a recent memo. She accused them of "circling the wagons" after 11 September and skewing the facts about their shortcomings for political self-preservation.

At least two things about the presidential announcement were odd. The first was how little advance indication there had been of such a sweeping government change.

The second was that the creation of a cabinet post to oversee homeland security could easily be construed not as a breakthrough for the administration but as an admission of political defeat. Just such a cabinet post was proposed by a bipartisan congressional commission the month that Mr Bush took office, precisely because of the perceived threat posed by al-Qa'ida and other groups. At the time, the White House rejected the idea, saying it wanted to set up its own commission of inquiry.

Then, immediately after 11 September, Mr Bush appointed his friend Tom Ridge, the Governor of Pennsylvania, as director of homeland security but pointedly refused to give the post cabinet rank with its own budgetary authority.

Ever since Mr Ridge's appointment, the President's critics have clamoured for him to be given greater powers so that he can institute real changes in the intelligence services and, most particularly, end the ceaseless turf wars that have all but stopped them from speaking to each other.

Those turf wars reached their nadir over the weekend when the FBI – by way of a judicious leak to Newsweek magazine – accused the CIA of tracing two of the 11 September hijackers in January 2000 but failing to pass on the information to its sister agency. Almost immediately, the CIA leaked a counter-attack, saying that it had informed the FBI about the pair as soon as it learnt of them, and had e-mail records to prove it. As the columnist Maureen Dowd said in The New York Times, the CIA and FBI seemed to regard each other as the true enemy, not Osama bin Laden or al-Qa'ida.

The President admitted on Tuesday that the FBI and CIA had not been communicating properly in the weeks before 11 September. "Now we've addressed that issue," Mr Bush said, even as the leaks and counter-leaks were in full swing.

The impression is that the White House initiatives are being prompted at least partly by fear. Time and again over the past month, the administration has made strenuous efforts to regain the initiative and hold on to the enormous public trust it has enjoyed since the hijacked planes hit their targets almost nine months ago. Each time, however, the efforts have been rebuffed by further embarrassing revelations.

When it was revealed that Mr Bush had been briefed in August last year about the possibility of Mr bin Laden hatching an attack in America, the administration responded by sounding the alarm about the risk of imminent new attacks.

Then, when it came to light that two FBI field officers, in Arizona and Minnesota, had sniffed out important clues to the 11 September attacks but had been ignored by their superiors, the administration announced a reorganisation of the FBI. Nearly 500 agents would be transferred from crime-fighting to counter-terrorism, Mr Mueller announced, and CIA agents would be invited to work with them.

This week, both agencies sought to refocus attention on the real work by announcing they had identified the true mastermind behind the 11 September plot, a Kuwaiti-born Pakistani called Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. The timing of the announcement looked manufactured, and the news was hardly reassuring: Mr Mohammed, with Mr bin Laden and other top al-Qa'ida figures, is believed to be still at large.