Bush to move on 9/11 recommendations
Pressure for reform builds, but some experts say process moving too fast
The Associated Press reports Friday that President Bush
may approve some of the recommendations of the 9/11 commission by early next week, as he strives to stay on top of the terrorism issue during an election year. On Thursday, from his vacation ranch in Crawford, Texas, Mr. Bush held a videoconference with his top advisers, who discussed which recommendations to act upon.
CBSNews reports that a Senate panel that was scheduled to meet next week to discuss the panel's findings will
instead meet on Friday to accommodate the schedules of the commission's two leaders: Republican Thomas Kean, the former governor of New Jersey, and retired Democratic Rep. Lee Hamilton of Indiana. The Senate panel is the first of several groups that will meet on Capitol Hill to discuss the 9/11 commission's work.
House Speaker Dennis Hastert announced earlier this week that at least six committees will hold at least 15 hearings in August on such issues as information-sharing, terror financing, intelligence analysis and government reorganization. Mr. Hastert had originally said he did not expect any action on the reports until next year. He said he now anticipates congressional action on the report sometime in
September and October, but certainly before the November election.
Democratic presidential nominee Senator John Kerry used his acceptance speech Thursday night in Boston to
again apply pressure to the Bush administration to implement the commission's findings as soon as possible. He told the crowd of Democratic delegates that he would enact all of the 9/11 commission's findings. Earlier in the week he called for the commission's life
to be extended by another 18 months.
One reason that politicians seem to be in a rush to enact legislation,
ABC News reported on Wednesday, is that the 9/11 families who were largely responsible for the creation of the commission over the objections of the White House, has vowed to keep a "
watchdog list" of any members of Congress who oppose legislation implementing changes recommended by the Sept. 11 commission.
But even with the flurry of political pronouncements on how important it is to act quickly on the commission's findings, columnist Andrew Greeley writes in the
Chicago Sun-Times that he does not expect any Congressional action before the November election, and that there is a "
a conspiracy of silence to protect the Bush administration from the voters' judgment about its mistakes."
Heaven forefend that the issues of who messed up on Sept. 11 and in preparation for the Iraq war should affect the outcome of the election. Heaven equally forbid that these matters be debated during the campaign. Heaven protect the American people from thinking there are issues besides abortion and gay marriage, and whether people will "warm up" to John Kerry. Nor should anyone dare to ask why it required almost three years since the World Trade Center attack to produce a detailed report of the failures of our intelligence agencies and a blueprint to reform them. Nor should there be a debate about a foreign policy that has alienated the world, nor about why the dead in Iraq are now about a third of those who died in the 9/11 explosion. No one should ask about how much safer Americans really are today. Not during an election year.
Greeley points out, for instance, that Congress never acted in 1995 on the recommendations of the Gore Comission on aviation that "cockpit doors on airplanes be bulletproof and locked – which would have saved 3,000 lives on Sept. 11." And columnist Clifford May writes for
The Union Leader of New Hampshire that it may be difficult for the government to enact the kind of legislation that will solve the key problem that Mr. May says the commission wrote about:
a lack of imagination.
Would it have required a huge imaginative leap for a terrorism expert to ask himself: "What other vehicle might a terrorist use? A motorbike? No, too small. A blimp? No, too slow. An airplane ��� wait a minute!" There were other clues as well. In 1994, a private plane crashed onto the South Lawn of the White House. In 1995, Abdul Hakim Murad admitted to Philippine authorities that he and Ramzi Yousef ��� a perpetrator of the 1993 WTC attack ��� had discussed flying a plane into CIA headquarters. But David Ignatius argues in
The Washington Post that delay might not be such a bad thing, because the issues at stake are too important to be dealt with in a rush precipitated by a national election. Mr. Ignatius says there is something "dispiriting" about the
"knee-jerk" reaction by both parties to embrace the commission's findings without an real debate about them.
Sadly, Kerry's me-too approach to the Sept. 11 commission is of a piece with his bland flag-waving on foreign policy in general. America is a nation at war. Yet we have no sense, even after Kerry has been nominated, of just what policies he would pursue in Iraq and the Middle East. There's a three-alarm blaze outside and he's telling us he supports the fire department. The Bush administration's effort to wrap itself in the bipartisan flag of the commission is even more outrageous. Do the administration's spin controllers think the country has forgotten that the president refused to allow his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, to testify before the panel until forced to do so by public outcry? Do they think people won't actually read the report and see its devastating account of the administration's failure to mobilize for the al Qaeda threat? And
The Morning Call of Allentown, Pennslyvania argues that the commission's recommendations are too important for "politics as usual."
Even before the commission completed its work, it was clear the nation's intelligence community needed to be better coordinated and run. However, would creating a Cabinet-level intelligence czar to oversee the various intelligence agencies lead to better results or more politicization? More and more experts are cautioning Congress and the White House to carefully consider the commission's report and act deliberately. Inaction is unacceptable, but so, too, are rushed decisions.
Also...
•
Bombs away (
National Review)
•
Canadian sent to Syrian prison disputes US claims against torture (
Knight-Ridder)
•
Our media kills a troubling story that the rest of the world saw (
The Memory Hole)
•
Ashcroft cries wolf, again (
In These Times)
•
Saudis take lead in bringing Muslim troops to Iraq (
Daily Star, Lebanon)
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