Printable Version

Federal Government Still Getting Fs

By J. Scott Orr, Newhouse News Service

September 8, 2006

More than two years after the 9/11 commission issued its prescription for a safer America, the federal government has failed to act on some of the investigative panel's most basic recommendations, members of the commission including its chairman Tom Kean said last week.

As the fifth anniversary of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, approaches, commission members and others said even seemingly simple tasks like compiling a list of the names of suspected terrorists and comparing it against the names of individuals boarding commercial aircraft have yet to be accomplished.

"In some areas, things are, very gradually, getting better. But there are a lot of things we should be doing that we aren't doing," Kean said in a telephone interview.

"There's still not a unified watch list when you get on the airplane and that's appalling. Some agencies don't want to give up those names, I gather, but that's so important and it should be so simple," the Republican former governor of New Jersey said.

Another recommendation to give first responders their own slice of radio frequency has been delayed by Congress until at least 2009. And the sharing of intelligence a recommendation stemming from the commission's intense focus on pre-Sept. 11 intelligence failures is still not being carried out efficiently across the federal government, Kean said.

Former Indiana Rep. Tim Roemer, a Democrat who also served on the commission, said little has changed since last December when the federal government received poor grades in adopting the commission's recommendations.

"There was initially a good deal of bipartisan support for these recommendations. ... Now there's not enough momentum, there's not enough support," he said.

"There are a huge number of dysfunctional problems in the government today," Roemer said.

Last week, the Bush administration issued a new report on its anti-terror strategy and a booklet titled "9/11 Five Years Later: Successes and Challenges." Both proclaim significant progress, but acknowledge that America is not yet safe from further attack.

"Since 9/11, our coalition has captured or killed al-Qaida managers and operatives and scores of other terrorists across the world. ... Over the past five years, we've acted to disrupt the flow of weapons (and) support from terrorist states to terrorist networks," Bush said Tuesday.

On Thursday, Bush said the nation is safer than it was five years ago because of new homeland security protections and because U.S. forces are fighting terrorists abroad. But, he said, "five years after 9/11, America still faces determined enemies. And we will not be safe until those enemies are finally defeated."

Critics insist that following the 9/11 commission's blueprint would be the easiest way to make the country more secure.

"At the time that the Taliban is once again regaining primacy in Afghanistan, when up-to-date detection equipment has not been fully deployed at our nation's airports, and when our first responders still cannot communicate with one another, failing to fully implement all 41 of the 9/11 commission's recommendations is simply inexcusable," said Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J.

At its final meeting last December, the 9/11 Public Discourse Project the successor to the 9/11 commission issued a report that gave the Congress and White House poor grades in implementing the recommendations the panel issued in July 2004.

The former commissioners cited the lack of a terror watch list, poor baggage screening at airports, the absence of a requirement that homeland security funding be distributed based on levels of risk, a failure to provide first responders with communications resources, lagging cross-agency intelligence sharing, a failure to rate the vulnerabilities of critical infrastructure, a lack of international collaboration on border document security and many other areas.

Of the 41 recommendations examined by the former commissioners, the highest grade the government got was a single A-minus for its "vigorous effort against terrorist financing" and its use of financial records as an intelligence tool. The breakdown for the rest of the recommendations: 12 Bs, nine Cs, 12 Ds, five Fs and two incompletes.

Critics say the government's grade-point average has hardly improved: "They've gotten F's ... and they've done nothing to improve their grades," Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said last week.

The White House responded to the former commission's report saying the administration "has restructured and reformed the Federal government to focus resources on counterterrorism and to ensure the security of our homeland." The response went on to say that it had begun work on 37 of the 39 recommendations pertaining directly to the White House and was working on others with Congress.

A report issued in August by the non-partisan Center for Strategic and International Studies said "the United States has made notable strides on the domestic security agenda since 9/11."

"America's response to the cataclysm was broad-based, with massive initiatives undertaken in the belief that the global security landscape, as well as key national institutions, needed reshaping to provide citizens with better security," the report said.

It added, however, that many challenges remain.

"Today, the most important question `Are we prepared?' cannot be answered, mainly because the government's response to the terrorist threat remains by-and-large ad hoc and incomplete," the report said.

While that same report credited the administration with enhancing intelligence-sharing with the creation of the National Counterterrorism Center, it noted there is still "inadequate coordination between the Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security, and FBI."

A report from the Democratic staff of the House Committee on Homeland Security, issued earlier this year, said most significant threats to aviation security were "sabotage by `sleepers' among airport workers, a terrorist being allowed to board a U.S.-bound plane without being checked against a terror watch list, and an attack emanating in the air cargo hold."

Fran Townsend, special assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterrorism, said last week that the federal government has made progress, but the terrorist threat persists and security challenges remain.

"I do think we're safer, but, you know, there's more to be done, and they (terrorists) are very determined," she said.