Conventional wisdom tells us that September 11, 2001, changed everything. The suicide hijacking attacks were supposed to be a clarion call to a new conception of public safety and of national security, particularly in three of its core components: homeland defense, the legal system, and intelligence.

Well, things are certainly different, but are they better? Has all the rethinking and reshuffling made us safer? Three newly released books paint a gloomy picture.

Perhaps most immediately alarming is “Open Target” (Palgrave Macmillan, 256 pages, $24.95) by Clark Kent Ervin, the first and now, with evident bitterness,the former inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security. His depiction of the new agency is as depressing as it is frightening: a hopelessly sprawling 22-agency, $30 billion a year behemoth foisted on a reluctant president by Congress’s politics of disaster. Those politics – as attested by all three of these books – scream: Do something! Invariably, that “something” is hasty, and steeped in the delusion that safety somehow lies in bureaucratic design rather than function. Dysfunction,instead,is the byword for DHS, according to Mr. Ervin.

While one might expect growing pains in the early tenure of a new department of such a dimension,the problem with DHS is not its newness but its oldness.Mr.Ervin writes that it is seized with the worst features of Washington’s pre-September 11 sloth: a pervasive lack of urgency about the terrorist threat; incompetent performance of its basic functions (he describes airports still easy to move weapons through,borders so porous as to render academic some real improvements that have been made in visa security, and ports and rail carriers so neglected that they remain a WMD attack waiting to happen); and, worst of all, a hierarchy that ducks responsibility and accountability while failing to deal with the most rudimentary of its extensive organizational problems.

That Mr. Ervin’s ire is directed mainly at the administration is eye-opening. He is a longtime friend of the president’s from his years as governor of Texas who moved to DHS after first serving in the Bush State Department. In his telling, though, Mr. Ervin quickly became a pariah for simply doing his job.To be sure, inspectors general, with responsibility for internal compliance, are often unpopular at their own agencies. Here, though, Mr. Ervin contends the enmity reached debilitating heights as top department officials (including Tom Ridge, the first DHS secretary) were miffed by his exposure of embarrassing internal lapses, and Mr. Ervin’s aggressiveness soon cost him even his White House support. But Mr. Ervin does not spare Congress either. He portrays Senators Lieberman and Collins, prime movers behind the creation of DHS, as contributing to the dysfunction by blocking his confirmation and thus hastening his departure.

The post-September 11 legal system is the target of a Yale law professor, Bruce Ackerman. While he concedes that drastic measures must be taken in times of national peril, his thesis in “Before the Next Attack” (Yale University Press, 227 pages, $26) is that the Constitution,which has served us so well since 1787, is not up to the task of the current crisis. The difficulty is not that it can’t ensure the necessary projection of power against our enemies – far from it. No, for Mr. Ackerman, our law does not sufficiently safeguard our civil liberties. Thus, we need to supplement it with an “emergency constitution” – one supple enough to deal with sudden attacks while tightly regulating presidential prerogatives. The president, in the author’s conception, is chiefly responsible for the erosion of fundamental freedoms.

Consistent with this theory, Mr. Ackerman is emphatic that our current struggle is not a “war” but merely an “emergency.” War must be avoided because executive power traditionally predominates in wartime. Mr. Ackerman is ever wary of what he sees as the presidential propensity for overkill. Like most of the academy, and especially the law professoriate, he would prefer a system of antecedent rules, enacted by Congress, prescribing how the president may respond to attacks. With the chief executive basically reduced to prime minister, this whole arrangement would, of course, be overseen by the courts.

Ironically, Mr. Ackerman insists this construct would simply bolster the checks and balances by which the Framers intended the branches to rein in each other. That claim is far-fetched.The impetus for the Constitution was the failure of the Articles of Confederation,just the sort of national-security-by-committee Mr. Ackerman would impose. The Framers recognized that external threats were unpredictable and potentially ruinous; thus, only a unitary executive with broad powers would be able to muster the force, with the necessary speed and dexterity, to quell threats to the American people. And the Framers – to say nothing of Supreme Court decisions conceding presidential supremacy and judicial inaptitude in foreign affairs – would be stunned at the thought of national security being managed by unaccountable judges rather than the one official elected by all the people precisely to vouchsafe their security.

Finally, in “Uncertain Shield” (Rowman & Littlefield, 228 pages, $19.95), federal appellate Judge Richard Posner, one of the nation’s pre-eminent thinkers, continues the searing critique of post-9/11 intelligence reform that he began last year with “Preventing Surprise Attacks.” The latter primarily addressed the state of “warning intelligence” in the wake of the overhaul of the intelligence community that Congress based on the 9/11 Commission’s ill-conceived recommendations. “Uncertain Shield” updates the scorecard more comprehensively in light of significant and still-unfolding later developments, such as the Silberman-Robb Commission’s report on the IC’s pre-war assessment of Iraq’s weapons-of-mass destruction programs.

It is, to put it mildly, a monument to our elected officials’ elevation of politics over performance that Congress, in the ballyhooed 2004 Intelligence Reform Act, undertook to revamp the nation’s entire $40-plus-billion-per-year, multi-layer intelligence system – in the middle of a war, with the homeland under threat of a 9/11 reprise, and, naturally, in the stretch-run of an election campaign – without awaiting the benefit of findings from a multimillion-dollar commission that it well knew was studying the capabilities of that very system. As Judge Posner demonstrates – in an arresting book that is effective because the analyst is an authoritative but agenda-free outsider whose writing style is crystal-clear and whose principal tool is sober analysis – this caution-to-the-wind approach to something as imperative to our security as competent intelligence has potentially left us even more vulnerable to attack than we were before September 11.

Good intelligence is a competitive endeavor. As its purpose is to root out the zealously guarded secrets of those who threaten us, it is unreasonable to expect intelligence to be perfect or to assume that successful attacks or other unforeseen developments necessarily signal design flaws in the IC. Our best hope of divining the truly perilous indicators from the cacophony of noise and chatter is to have disaggregated agencies, with multiple ears to the ground, conducting their own evaluations. Certainly, they must share information. But they must also compete with and challenge each other, ensuring that intelligence gathering and analysis don’t overlook anything that might be salient.

But post-September 11 intelligence reform has resulted in more centralization and more bureaucracy. It leaves the IC more amenable to the type of groupthink that is likely to miss disparate clues. Moreover, Congress’s inclination to delve into the minutiae of organizational design and procurement practices – exhibiting (like Mr. Ackerman) an aversion to executive discretion – has retarded the urgent need to upgrade to, much less develop, superior information technology. And politically charged concerns over civil liberties make commonsense investigative improvements an uphill battle.

All in all, a grim picture that could portend disaster.

Mr. McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor, is a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.