Someday Americans may die because of Congress’s decision earlier this month to cripple a Defense Department program designed to catch future Mohamed Attas before they strike. That’s not a prediction. But it is a fear.

Among the signals that should have alerted the FBI well before September 11, 2001, that Islamic terrorists might be thinking of crashing airplanes into American buildings was the 1996 confession of a captured Pakistani terrorist named Abdul Hakim Murad. He and others had planned to blow up 12 U.S.-owned airliners over the Pacific Ocean-and he had taken flying lessons in the U.S. to prepare to crash a plane into CIA headquarters. The planned suicide flight was not included in the criminal charges against Murad, apparently because it had not ripened into a provable conspiracy. But surely a crack counter-terrorism agency would have gone on the lookout for any signs of similar plots by other jihadists.

What did the FBI do? It "effectively forgot all about it," asserted Sen. Richard C. Shelby of Alabama, who was the Senate Select Intelligence Committee’s senior Republican for the past six years, in an impressive 84-page brief last month calling for "radical reform" of the intelligence community. "Convinced that the only information that really matters was information directly related to the criminal investigation at hand, the FBI thus ignored this early warning sign that terrorists had begun planning to crash aircraft into symbols of U.S. power. Thus, rather than being stored [and] assessed and re-assessed in light of a much broader universe of information about terrorist plans and intentions over time, the Murad data-point. … slipped out of the FBI’s usable institutional memory." So it was that in the summer of 2001, it never crossed anyone’s mind at the FBI to see the accumulating evidence of possible Qaeda plans to crash planes into buildings as part of a pattern dating back for years.

At a time when presidential power is expanding inexorably to deal with unprecedented terrorist threats, aggressive congressional oversight is an essential check against abuse. And at a time when both the House and the Senate are controlled by the president’s party-and unlikely to push him hard for information-the role of Congress’s investigative and auditing arm, the General Accounting Office, is especially vital.

Editorial writers and other guardians of privacy have had a field day with the reports that former Reagan National Security Adviser John M. Poindexter has come back as a cross between Dr. Strangelove and Big Brother. Poindexter is watching you, or soon will be, his detractors suggest, as they lovingly detail his 1990 convictions (later reversed on appeal) for his lies to Congress about the Iran-Contra affair. The Web site for Poindexter’s "Total Information Awareness" program at the Pentagon foolishly fans such fears, featuring the slogan "Scientia Est Potentia"-Knowledge Is Power-complete with an ominous, all-seeing eye atop a pyramid.

One [FBI] agent, frustrated at encountering the "wall" [separating intelligence officials from criminal investigators], wrote to headquarters [on Aug. 29, 2001]: "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.’ The biggest threat to us now, UBL [Osama bin Laden], is getting the most `protection.’ "-Opinion of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, November 18, 2002

There is, actually. Even the Bush Justice Department says so, explaining in a recent legal brief that people who sympathize with foreign terrorist groups are free to "meet with their members and advocate their causes"-which in many cases include peaceful political and humanitarian activities as well as mass murder. The First Amendment guarantees you a right to visit terrorists, speak with them, worship with them, have lunch with them, defend their methods, or sign up as a member of their group.

During a conversation on August 27, 2001, … [an agent in the FBI’s Minneapolis office told an FBI headquarters official that] he was trying to make sure that Moussaoui "did not take control of a plane and fly it into the World Trade Center." The Minneapolis agent said that the headquarters agent told him, "… You don’t have enough to show he is a terrorist." – Eleanor Hill, staff director of the joint committee investigating intelligence failures, in testimony on September 24, 2002

The Bush administration’s hard-line hawks, led by Vice President Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and their top aides, exude an imperial bellicosity and a hubristic disdain for international law and opinion that could end up undermining our national security. The risk is that they will commit us to a succession of go-it-alone wars-not only in Iraq but also in Iran, North Korea, perhaps Libya, possibly Pakistan (if militant Islamists take power) and elsewhere-that would destroy our relations with Europe, isolate us even from Britain, inflame the Islamic world, and spawn legions of new terrorists.