Commission's recommendations should not provoke partisanship

July 24, 2004

Twenty months in the making, the report from the bipartisan commission selected to review circumstances around the Sept. 11, 2001 hijackings that resulted in more than 3,000 lives lost in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania, deems that despite all promises to the contrary, "we are not safe."

It does, however, make some recommendations to point our nation in that direction.

The commission has called for major changes in our intelligence agencies, how information is gathered, and most importantly, how information is shared. The panel of five Republicans and five Democrats stopped short of assigning blame to either any one individual or the administrations of Presidents Bush or Clinton, but did go into substantial detail about claims of Iraqi connection with the Sept. 11 attack.

It said, in short, that there was none.

The commission also calls for a national counterterrorism center that would be under the authority of a director with control over all intelligence-gathering agencies up to and including the directors of the FBI and the CIA. The post would be Cabinet-level, under the commission’s recommendation, and the director would have to receive Senate confirmation.

But above all, the commission said the actions America takes to not only ensure another Sept. 11 doesn’t happen but to be more aware of global factors that would aid in capturing and punishing terrorists should be taken immediately.

That Congress is in summer session and won’t reconvene until after Labor Day will forestall any immediate action. And the Bush administration, while accepting the report with public appreciation, by most accounts is not enthused about a new Cabinet post to deal with terrorism.

The commission has stressed its report and the subsequent actions of the United States will be an election-year issue.

"If these reforms are not the best that can be done for the American people, then the Congress and the president need to tell us what’s better," Republican commissioner James Thompson, a former Illinois governor, said at a news conference Thursday, according to published reports by the Associated Press and in The Washington Post.

"But if there is nothing better, (our recommendations) need to be enacted and enacted speedily, because if something bad happens while these recommendations are sitting there, the American people will quickly fix political responsibility for failure," he said.

Some lawmakers are fearful that the creation of a new department to oversee intelligence agencies will do little but create a new level of bureaucracy but the bottom line is this: What we doing at present apparently isn’t working. The inability of the various agencies to share information and work together for the common good is for all practical purposes public knowledge.
Like a partisan elected body, some of the intelligence community’s members have fought each other more than the real enemies — terrorism and a fearful world.

The report is out; the time to act is now, without any delay more than what is absolutely necessary.

We have been told repeatedly that we are safer, that we should go about our lives normally, and with some exceptions, most of the nation has. Those exceptions, however, have more of a personal stake in the report’s findings than the average American. They have their memories of those family members who died in one of the three attacks that day in 2001. They, perhaps more than any of the commission members, can indeed make politicians understand they cannot play politics; even more than the commission that issued the report, our national-level leaders must be even more above partisanship, must put petty political squabbles aside and act as one body to keep America safe.

The report, which does not blame Bush or former President Clinton for specific errors that led up to 9/11 nonetheless says neither administration made anti-terrorism as much of a priority as they should have, even going so far as to say that neither president took the threat "as seriously as it should have been taken."

Yet we believe the report should not be considered an assignment of blame but rather a blueprint for what we now face as a nation and how we can make our country more secure. The steps recommended in the report should not be delayed by political bickering or become campaign slogans for November.

Both candidates and both parties should embrace the report’s findings not as campaign fodder but as among those issues we must address as a cohesive nation.

Sept. 11 is bigger than politics; making our nation secure is as well.

Copyright 2004, Anderson Independent Mail. All Rights Reserved.