As we and many other observers noted yesterday in the wake of George Tenet's resignation as director of the CIA, this development creates an unparalleled opportunity to undertake a serious and systemic reform of U.S. intelligence operations. These much-needed reforms fall into three areas:

• New leadership and management. Tenet's departure removes a major obstacle to one of the most obvious reforms: establishing a Director of National Intelligence to oversee all of our nation's intelligence gathering, analysis, and dissemination efforts. The CIA has long opposed this step, which implies, accurately, that its chief's title as "Director of Central Intelligence" is largely fictional. We need a true intelligence chief who can not only coordinate intelligence operations and give the federal government a single voice on intelligence issues, but can rein in renegade outfits like the one that has been wreaking havoc over at the Pentagon. Sen. John Kerry, yesterday, urged the president to embrace this reform, but it's got plenty of bipartisan support, as reflected in its endorsement by Congress' Joint Committee on Intelligence.
• Improved collection and analysis of domestic intelligence. No reform is more important than getting the information and analysis we need to prevent another 9/11. But it's abundantly clear the FBI, currently in charge of domestic intelligence, is not up to the job. A recent Congressional Research Service study showed that the FBI itself admits two-thirds of its approximately 1,200 intelligence analysts are not qualified to do their jobs. Moreover, after fighting the idea of a separate domestic intelligence agency (which we have long supported), FBI Director Robert Mueller abruptly told the 9/11 commission earlier this week that the Bureau now supports a separate and semi-autonomous intelligence division within its own walls. Whether it's done internally or externally, the time has come to separate domestic intelligence from the law enforcement functions -- and the entrenched culture -- of the FBI, and give the mission to an entity prepared to make it Job One.
• Better dissemination of intelligence from all sources. Even the best information will be useless if we don't do a better job of connecting the dots and putting critical intelligence in the hands of those, including state and local law enforcement, who can act on it. But nearly three years after 9/11, the federal government still maintains a host of separate Terrorist Watch Lists (even though this technologically straightforward task could be accomplished within a matter of a couple of months); it still refuses to fully share intelligence data with state and local law enforcement agencies; and it has made virtually no progress to create a decentralized and comprehensive information technology-based network to detect and prevent terrorist attacks. All this foot-dragging needs to end.

None of these reform ideas are new, but all have been either opposed or ignored by the administration for some time. It's not clear whether the administration will take advantage of the new circumstances to move off the dime, perhaps it will through one of the president's breathtaking 180 degree turns to adopt the position of his critics while pretending it's his own idea (remember the Department of Homeland Security, which the administration opposed and then proposed?). According to The Washington Post: "Some Republicans said Tenet's resignation shows that administration officials recognize they made mistakes, even if they are not publicly admitting them." But The New York Times suggested "Mr. Bush's decision to elevate Mr. Tenet's deputy for the remainder of the year... means that the big issues of how to reorganize America's intelligence operations and diagnose what went wrong in the last few years will not be seriously addressed until next year."

We hope that's not true. Given the parlous situation in Iraq, and new reports of Al Qaeda plans to attack the United States, intelligence reform and modernization is more important than the bruised bureaucratic sensitivities of current intelligence operatives, and more important than politics.