9/11 commissioners: US at 'great risk' for more terrorist attacks
Bipartisan panel gives White House, Congress 'more F's than A's' in response to their report.
A new report to be issued by the former members of the 9/11 commission will say that more than four years after the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, US intelligence agencies still fail to share information, as Congress continues to battle over security funding.
The
Associated Press reports that in interviews Friday, former members of the commission said the government should
receive failing grades for failing to enact strong security to prevent further terrorist attacks. "No parent would be happy with this report card," said former Democratic commissioner Jamie Gorelick.
The members of the commission - five Democrats and five Republicans - disbanded the official commision in July 2004 after they issued a report with 41 recommendations for security. The members then founded a new group,
9/11 Public Discourse Project, using private money. That group will issue its highly critical report Monday, and then its members will disband permanently.
Overall, the government has performed "not very well," said former commission chairman Thomas Kean, former Republican governor of New Jersey.
"Before 9/11, both the Clinton and Bush administrations said they had identified Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida as problems that have to be dealt with, and were working on it," Kean said. "But they just were not very high on their priority list. And again it seems that the safety of the American people is not very high on Washington's priority list."
Appearing Sunday on
NBC's Meet The Press, Mr. Kean and Lee Hamilton, the Democratic co-chair of the group, said they believe it's not a matter of if, but when,
a new terrorist attack will take placed in the US, and that "we are not as well prepared as we should be."
"There is a lack of a sense of urgency," Hamilton said. "There are so many competing priorities. We've got three wars going on: one in Afghanistan, one in Iraq and the war against terror. And it's awfully hard to keep people focused on something like this."
The government has enacted the commission's main recommendation – the creation of the position of national intelligence director, currently held by John Negroponte.
CNN reports that last week, in his first interview since becoming national intelligence director, Mr. Negroponte said that the
US was safer now than it was at 9/11 because of better integrated intelligence. But former commissioners dispute this contention, saying that the US is less safe than it was 18 months ago.The also argue that many of the top recommendations they made have been
given "short shrift."
Among their top concerns: first responders still cannot communicate with each other in an emergency because no part of the radio spectrum has been allocated for their use, the two men said.
"It really approaches scandal to think that, four years after 9/11, the police and the fire cannot talk to one another at the scene of the disaster," said Hamilton. "They could not do it on 9/11, and as a result of that, lives were lost. They could not do it at Katrina. They still cannot do it."
Kean also said that the US has to do more to repair its image in the world, or else "there's going to be more terrorists created than the ones we're now killing." White House National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley said the Bush administration had
accepted many of the 9/11 panel's recommendations, but he said on
FoxNews Sunday that there is more to be done.
"The 9/11 Commission made a number of recommendations, I think roughly 74 recommendations. The president reviewed them. We accepted 70 of them in whole or in large measure, and that is being implemented now. Obviously, as we've said all along, we are safer, but not yet safe. There is more to do." The
Village Voice reported recently that the 9/11 group is disbanding just at the time when some of their
previous decisions are being called into question, particularly around a secret government program named "Able Danger."
Able Danger is the secret military intelligence unit featured in stories published this summer in which military officers claimed that they had information about lead hijacker Mohammed Atta a year before the 9-11 attack. What's more, the sources of the story claim they told the 9-11 commission about it, but that information was left out of the final report. The 9-11 commissioners have dismissed the story as overblown, claiming in an op-ed piece just this week [late November] that their staff checked out the story and found no evidence it was true. The panel's statements, however, have been called into question by several people, including Rep. Curt Weldon (R) of Pennsylvania, who has called several times for the 9/11 commission to
give a more complete explanation of why it left this information out of its July 2004 report.
Also...
•
US official says can't confirm top Al Qaeda death (
Reuters)
•
McCain won't concede on torture ban (
Boston.com)
•
Wrongful Imprisonment: Anatomy of a CIA Mistake (
The Washington Post)
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Tom Regan
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