9-11 COMMISSION OFFERS GOOD RECOMMENDATIONS (7-2004)

Did President Bush, or anyone in his administration, have 
direct knowledge that terrorists were planning a massive 
attack on the U.S.? No, not likely. Could they have had the 
information needed to prevent the attack from taking place? 
Perhaps, according to the report released last Thursday by 
the independent 9-11 commission.

The panel, consisting of 10 bipartisan members, didn’t put 
direct blame on any one individual. But, it said, there was 
plenty of blame to go around.

Certainly there was a breakdown in communication among the 
various intelligence-gathering agencies. And security 
protocols at airports were much too weak to have prevented 
the terrorists from boarding the planes. All 19 who tried 
to board were allowed to board.

The biggest problem, however, seemed to be a lack of 
understanding by high-ranking government officials and 
those in the intelligence community that an attack of such 
magnitude could actually happen. The U.S. government was 
stuck in an archaic Cold War mentality and didn’t have the 
imagination necessary to see the terrorist threat that was 
right before its eyes.

The commission stopped short of saying the 9-11 attack, 
which killed nearly 3,000 people in New York and 
Washington, could have been prevented. But had the Bush and 
Clinton administrations paid more attention to the signs, 
the disaster may very well have been blunted.

“We do not believe they fully understood just how many 
people al-Qaida might kill and how soon it might do it,” 
the panel concluded. “Across the government, there were 
failures of imagination, policy, capabilities and 
management.”

House and Senate reports had already documented serious 
intelligence failures. The commission’s report agreed, and 
recommended that all the 15 separate intelligence 
organizations be lumped together under one government 
department at the Cabinet level. It also recommended 
forming a national counter terrorism unit.

Commission co-chairman Lee Hamilton, a former Democratic 
congressman from Indiana, said the commission found that no 
one in the government seemed to be in charge of 
intelligence gathering. Each group was acting 
independently, duplicating data and not sharing information 
he said.

In addition to its blistering criticism of both the Bush 
and Clinton administrations for not paying closer attention 
to terrorist activity, the panel also said that there is no 
evidence that Saddam Hussein or Iraq had anything to do 
with the attack. That, coupled with the lack of discovery 
of any weapons of mass destruction, leads one to wonder 
what Bush was thinking when he invaded Iraq.

Not only did Bush and his predecessor fumble the ball on 
identifying the terrorist threat prior to 9-11, Bush has 
handled the resulting “war on terrorism” with the same lack 
of finesse and understanding. Nearly three years later, we 
still have no idea where Bin Laden is, yet we have gone in 
and run a rampage through a sovereign nation that had 
nothing to do with the attack on America.

So what do we do in the wake of the commission’s findings 
and recommendations? The best idea is to follow those 
recommendations. The commission spent 20 months looking 
under every stone to determine what happened and how. It 
had to struggle with Bush who not only didn’t want the 
commission created in the first place, but tried to stand 
in its way when it tried to gather information from him. He 
resisted the release of some documents and fought against 
letting national security adviser Condoleezza Rice testify 
publicly under oath.

Bush called the commissions report “very constructive.” But 
he opposes the recommendation of forming a new cabinet-
level intelligence head.

If we are to prevent future terrorists acts, the best way 
we can do so isn’t to ramp up security checks at airports 
or public buildings, although doing so is certainly 
advisable. And we certainly shouldn’t tread on the First 
Amendment rights of U.S. citizens in the name of safety. 
No, the best thing we can do is to make absolutely certain 
we have the best and most efficient network of 
intelligence-gathering organizations on the planet. And we 
must make absolutely certain that they communicate with 
each other.