This week, at the tenth public hearing of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (the "9/11 Commission"), the long finger of blame turned to rubber, twisting and curling, pointing in every direction, even back upon itself.

The commission's deliberations had turned into a blame game last month, at the eighth public hearing, with the dramatic testimony of Richard Clarke, the former chief of counterterrorism. Clarke suggested that the airplane attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon were in some sense the fault of President George W. Bush's indifference to the terrorist threat during his first months in office. This accusation was made more sensational by the claim in Clarke's best-selling book, released to coincide with his appearance before the commission, that in contrast to Bush, President Bill Clinton, under whom Clarke had also served, had been "seized with the issue" of terrorism.

Clarke's story was a godsend for the Democrats. Ordinarily, it is Republicans who are tougher against external enemies whomever they may be: Communists, terrorists, rogue regimes, whatever. It is Democrats who offer a voice of caution. National security, they say, must be balanced against the budgetary needs of domestic programs and against the protection of civil liberties. Often, voters prefer the domestic agenda, but this year, when Americans still feel the pang of 9/11, they are likely to favor toughness, so Clarke's charge promised to turn the election campaign upside down.

The commission added fuel to the fire when its leaders asserted that the attack of 9/11 could have been prevented. "It didn't have to happen," said Thomas H. Kean, a former governor of New Jersey who is the chairman of the commission. Kean, a Republican, certainly did not mean by this to aid the Democrats. But the commission's decision to hold its deliberations in public, to speak often in the press, and to release numerous background papers from its staff rather than withhold them until its final report, has helped to make it a political arena.

At this week's hearing, the Bush administration official on the hot seat was Attorney General John Ashcroft. The story was again one of indifference: a May 2001 memo from Ashcroft listing his department's priorities made no mention of terrorism.

But Ashcroft was not the only Attorney General to appear. The commission also heard from Janet Reno who filled that office during the Clinton administration. Asked if in briefing Ashcroft as she turned her responsibilities over to him she had mentioned al Qaeda or Usama bin Laden or "the potential of terrorist activity in this country," Reno said "No, I didn't." As to how the Justice Department could be most effective in combating terrorism, Reno said "I tried to work through these issues . . . and time ran out on me." The implication was self-evident. Reno had held the post for nearly eight years. If that was not enough time, then how culpable could Ashcroft be, having held the post only for months?

This point was reinforced by the devastating staff reports on the FBI and CIA that the commission released. As chairman Kean summarized it, the report on the FBI amounted to an "indictment." The bureau "failed and it failed and it failed and it failed," he said.  The CIA came off no better. In the words of another commission member, John Lehman, the report on the CIA was a "damning evaluation of a system that is broken." The exposure of the failings of America's intelligence and counterintelligence agencies took some of the heat off political officials. And if the politicians were to blame for not fixing these problems, then surely the fault must lie more with Clinton who presided over the government for eight years than Bush who was there for eight months before 9/11.

Moreover, the men who had headed the two agencies fought back in terms that raised further questions about Clinton and other political actors. George Tenet, appointed to head the CIA in the latter Clinton years and kept on by Bush, said that the agency's human intelligence capabilities were in "disarray" after having to cut its personnel by twenty percent. Everyone understood that these cuts resulted from budget reductions imposed by Clinton and the Congress. Louis Freeh, Clinton's appointee as head of the FBI, argued that the bureau did the best it could with the resources it was given which, for dealing with terrorism, were only a small fraction of what he had requested. 

It was not only a matter of budgets, said Freeh, but also of "the authority that we had." He cited a 1996 antiterrorism bill that would have authorized wire taps, access to phone and credit card records, and tougher border controls. Before it was passed, said Freeh, an amendment in the House of Representatives "stripped the bill of its most important counterterrorism measures." Then he added coyly that the two commission members--Lee Hamilton and Timothy Roemer--who are former Congressman "actually voted on the amendment." He did not need to say that they had both voted in favor of it.

Ashcroft, too, fought back against his accusers. "We did not know an attack was coming because for nearly a decade our government had blinded itself to its enemies," he said. "Our agents were isolated by government-imposed walls, handcuffed by government-imposed restrictions."

The restrictions he referred to, as did Freeh, grow out of the American intelligence scandals of the 1970s which not only resulted in many new rules restraining the agencies but in a mentality of extreme caution not to infringe civil liberties. Thus when, a month before 9/11, officials arrested Zacarias Massaoui, FBI lawyers denied the field officers' requests for a subpoena to examine Massaoui's computer. Massaoui had been picked up on a visa violation after suspicions were aroused by his request to be taught how to steer a jet plane but not how to land one  The failure to investigate Massaoui thoroughly may have cost the U.S. its best opportunity to foil the 9/11 highjackings.

The "walls" mentioned by Ashcroft referred to something very specific, namely, a Justice Department order that keeps criminal investigations strictly separate from counterintelligence. This separation, which intelligence officials describe as one of their major handicaps, was codified in a 1995 memo by the Deputy Attorney General under Clinton, Jamie Gorelick. Mrs. Gorelick is herself a member of the 9/11 commission.

In short, the list of those now being held culpable before the commission has spread from Bush to Clinton to the bureaucracy to the Congress and now to the commission itself. In the end, we will probably learn that the real culprit of 9/11 was who knew it was at the outset--a tall, bearded man hiding somewhere in a cave on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

Joshua Muravchik is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.