This promises to be another controversy-packed week for the all-controversy-all-the-time Bush administration as the former 911 Commission releases a report saying the United States hasn’t learned much from 911 or the Commission report:
The 9/11 Public Discourse Project will release a “report card” Monday on how well the government has implemented the 41 recommendations made by the federal 9/11 commission in July 2004 — and it’s not going to be a good one, says former 9/11 commissioner Jamie Gorelick.
“No parent would be pleased with this report card,” she said.
“I think that we’re less safe than we were 18 months ago,” she added. “We have a tremendous agenda and we have just not been about doing what we need to make us safe.”
The 9/11 commission disbanded after issuing recommendations to improve the nation’s security in 2004.
Using private funds, the members have reconvened as the 9/11 Public Discourse Project to examine how well their directives have been followed — and found several of their recommendations have not been followed at all.
And lest you think this is a generalization, no it isn’t:
For example, first responders still can’t talk to each other across radio spectrums, Gorelick said. She also offered two other examples.
“We are still giving out federal money based on a revenue-sharing formula rather than risk,” she said. “We have loose nuclear weapons that have not been addressed as quickly as they need to be.”
Right now, the revenue-sharing issue is up for a vote in Congress. Currently, each state gets the same amount of money for homeland security, regardless of how much risk it faces.
“Half of the senators want to keep the revenue sharing monies going on a formula; the other half want want to do it on the basis of risk,” Gorelick said. “If one member would switch, you would have a risk-based approach to this. The same is true with appropriations for radio spectrums and other issues where money is going to other purposes, not to making us safer the way we need to be.”
The FBI has started to reform, Gorelick said, which was another aspect of the 2004 report. But, especially in the area of information sharing, “it’s not where it needs to be,” she said.
Then, later, the Commission’s chairman was even more blunt:
The U.S. is at great risk for more terrorist attacks because Congress and the White House have failed to enact several strong security measures, members of the former Sept. 11 commission said Sunday.
“It’s not a priority for the government right now,” said the former chairman, Thomas Kean, ahead of the group’s release of a report Monday assessing how well its recommendations have been followed.
“More than four years after 9/11 … people are not paying attention,” the former Republican governor of New Jersey said. “God help us if we have another attack.”
Added Lee Hamilton, the former Democratic vice chairman of the commission: “We believe that another attack will occur. It’s not a question of if. We are not as well-prepared as we should be.”
The sad part is that we all know what’ll happen next. Utter politics. Many Republican partisans will pounce upon it and denounce it as a political ploy, and try to discredit it. Many Democrats will not only quote it, but even take it a step further and ignore any progress in the area of terrorism. The administration will either reject the findings outright or be polite in public and unleash surrogate hatchetmen/hatchetwomen. And, of course, left and right talk radio will make it the topic of conversation.
In the end, it will be indicative of how even on an issue such as terrorism the country remains hideously polarized as terrorism has morphed into just one more political tool to used to bludgeon political foes. And while we don’t agree with Richard Reeves’ column suggesting George W. Bush is the worst president “ever,” it’s clear there was a lost opportunity on the issue of terrorism. Or, rather, two big ones.
One was to use 911 to truly unify the country. The irony is that the GOP and Bush probably could have gotten whopping numbers in subsequent elections if GWB had truly emulated a wartime FDR instead of descending into Rovian divide-and-rule. The second is the fact that the BIPARTISAN Commission’s recommendations are now apparently worth about as much as the paper they were printed on.
Until there is another big terrorist attack.
And then, we suspect, there will be a scramble and they will be judged to have been worth a lot more.