RUTHFULLY YOURS

‘Why is this necessary?” asked President Obama in his recent speech defending the National Security Agency’s metadata program to track phone calls. He cited the 9/11 hijackers who escaped detection because the NSA couldn’t connect the dots using records of calls involving terrorists in the U.S. After failing for months to defend the NSA, Mr. Obama gets credit for citing the 9/11 attacks 10 times in the speech, and for making clear there is no evidence of systematic abuse by the NSA.

But instead of further rebutting myths about the NSA, Mr. Obama declared that “trust” must be restored and announced changes in policy that reflect exactly the sort of pre-9/11 thinking that made the attacks possible.

Before 9/11, the NSA couldn’t mine telephone metadata, which show which number was called but not what was said on the call. No one knew hijackers Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi were already in California awaiting orders when they were in phone contact with al Qaeda plotters in Yemen. Mr. Obama explained that the telephone metadata program was created to “address a gap identified after 9/11” by mapping the “communications of terrorists so we could see who they may be in contact with as quickly as possible.”

But there was another reason for 9/11: Lawyers in the Clinton administration had created a wall that prevented information sharing between intelligence agencies and criminal investigators. The 9/11 Commission report, published in 2004, detailed how this wall prevented authorities from detecting Mihdhar and Hazmi, who hijacked the plane that crashed into the Pentagon. The CIA learned in the summer of 2001 that they were in the U.S., but because of the wall FBI headquarters refused to let its investigators with knowledge of al Qaeda join the hunt.

An FBI agent, denied access to intelligence, wrote this prescient complaint in the weeks before the attacks: “Whatever has happened to this—someday someone will die—and wall or not—the public will not understand why we were not more effective and throwing every resource we had at certain ‘problems.’ “

“Someone built this wall,” then-Attorney General John Ashcroft told the 9/11 Commission. He declassified a memo written in 1995 by President Clinton’s deputy attorney general, Jamie Gorelick, instructing then-FBI Director Louis Freeh and U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White that for the sake of “appearances” they must suppress any information sharing beyond the requirements of any law.

“We believe it is prudent to establish a set of instructions that will more clearly separate the counterintelligence investigations from the more limited, but continued, criminal investigations,” the Gorelick memo read. “These procedures, which go beyond what is legally required, will prevent any risk of creating an unwarranted appearance that [the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] is being used to avoid procedural safeguards which would apply in a criminal investigation.”

The 9/11 Commission detailed how this wall, with its “appearances” and insistence on going beyond “what is legally required,” suppressed information and created legal and operational uncertainties. “It is now clear that everyone involved was confused about the rules governing the sharing and use of information,” the report concluded. “No one looked at the bigger picture; no analytic work foresaw the lightning that could connect the thundercloud to the ground.”

Like the Gorelick wall, which was dismantled right after 9/11, this new Obama wall was built for “appearances” and creates similar legal and operational hurdles. It reflects the mindset of liberal academic lawyers who made up majorities of his advisory committees, not people with experience using big data to prevent terrorism.

Mr. Obama decided that federal judges should only approve queries of phone metadata individually “after a judicial finding, or in a true emergency.” Bipartisan leaders of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees immediately pointed out that approach was tried before and caused dangerous delays. The 11 federal judges who serve on the FISA court sent a letter to Mr. Obama saying the idea he endorsed of introducing an advocacy group into its proceedings is “unnecessary—and could prove counterproductive.” As with the Gorelick wall, the Obama wall will lead to uncertainties sure to paralyze intelligence officers and law enforcement.

The president also arbitrarily decided to reduce to two from three the number of “hops,” or degrees of separation, away from a suspected target phone analysts can jump when assessing communications data. He couldn’t say how other changes might be implemented, such as his pledge to transfer phone metadata to a third party without creating greater privacy risk.

Opinion polls show record distrust of Washington due to big-government fiascos like ObamaCare and the political abuse of the IRS. But most Americans agree that defending the country from terror attacks is a necessary role for government.

The forgotten lesson of 9/11 is that terrorism can be prevented only if intelligence gatherers such as the NSA have the tools they need to get the job done.