President Bush on Friday named seven members to a commission to review American intelligence capabilities. The panel will look at America’s spying and analysis on the questions of weapons of mass destruction. Among the members named by Mr. Bush were the president of Yale, Richard Levin; one of Mr. Bush’s opponents for the Republican presidential nomination in 2000, Senator McCain, and a White House counsel to Presidents Carter and Clinton, Lloyd Cutler.

The New York Times’s response to this was to assert, in an editorial, “This group lacks the stature and name recognition that would give its findings commanding credibility.”

Since when is “name recognition” a test for credibility? If it were, Mr. Bush should have named Michael Jackson or Michael Jordan to the commission. How many people had heard of Richard Feynman before he was named to the commission on the space shuttle Challenger disaster? It is a lot fewer than have heard of Mr. McCain.

As for stature, it’s hard to see what the Times means when it says the president of Yale lacks stature. Which college president should have been named to the commission? The one from Barnard? Tufts?

But suppose one grants the doubtful assumption that name recognition and stature are two qualities to look for in these appointments. Who would fit the bill? How about…Henry Kissinger?

You may recall that Mr. Bush tried that back in 2002, naming Mr. Kissinger to chair a commission on the September 11 terrorist attacks. The New York Times responded by hounding Mr. Kissinger off the September 11 commission, trying to get him to disclose his list of clients and claiming that the clients somehow posed a conflict of interest.

The Times’s lack of curiosity about, say, Lloyd Cutler’s clients is one more piece of evidence that the Kissinger controversy of 2002 was about the Times and Mr. Kissinger, not about “conflict of interest” or any more generally applicable principle. According to press reports, the clients of Mr. Cutler’s law firm include the Carlyle Group, a private equity firm that does business with Saudi Arabia.

We happen to think the commissioners named by Mr. Bush on Friday, Mr. Cutler included, are an impressive and well-qualified group. By our lights and our reading of the Constitution, though, the job of intelligence oversight is one that properly belongs to Mr. Bush himself and to the Congress, not to some special commission. Had Senator Rockefeller, the top Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee, not turned that panel into a partisan playpen, the current special commission, and the debate over its members’ qualifications, would be superfluous.