9/11 Panel Says U.S. Fails Terror Readiness Checkup

By Greg Miller

Dec. 6, 2005 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

WASHINGTON — The commission that investigated the Sept. 11 attacks issued a harsh report card Monday on the federal government’s efforts to shore up defenses and protect the nation against future terrorist strikes.

More than four years after the attacks on New York and the Pentagon, the United States does not check identities of air travelers against a complete terrorism watch list and continues to dole out domestic security funds without regard for the fact that certain parts of the country are at greater risk of attack than others, former members of the Sept. 11 panel said.

They also criticized the United States’ handling of detainees, persistent problems in communication systems for first responders and excessive secrecy surrounding intelligence spending. In all, the panel issued more failing grades than A’s or Bs in the report card on the government’s efforts to implement commission recommendations.

“While the terrorists are learning and adapting, our government is still moving at a crawl,” said Thomas H. Kean, the former Republican governor of New Jersey who served as chairman of the Sept. 11 panel. “Four years after 9/11, we are not as safe as we could be, and that’s simply not acceptable.”

White House spokesman Scott McClellan defended the administration’s post-Sept. 11 efforts, saying that it has acted on 37 of the 39 recommendations that applied to the executive branch. He also pointed to the war in Iraq and efforts to capture Al Qaeda operatives overseas, saying: “The best way to protect the American people is to take the fight to the enemy, to stay on the offensive.”

But commission members thought the White House and Congress had not done enough to implement many of the recommendations.

“Fs and Ds and incompletes aren’t the American ideal and the American standard of excellence, not when it comes to protecting our people,” said Timothy J. Roemer, a former Democratic House member from Indiana and a former Sept. 11 panel member. “We can do better. We must do better than that.”

The commission ceased operation after issuing a 567-page report last year, a document that recounted in detail the failures leading up to Sept. 11 and which inspired an array of reforms -- including a major restructuring of the U.S. intelligence community.

Afterward, its members formed a privately funded foundation to monitor the government’s progress. The document released Monday was the group’s last project, members said, adding that the foundation would disband.

The Sept. 11 commission, formally known as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, earned a rare reputation in the history of Washington’s blue-ribbon panels. Formed in the year after the attacks, its 10 members -- five Democrats and five Republicans -- grew into a close-knit fraternity that dissected U.S. preparedness, confronted the Bush administration and worked smoothly across party lines.

With its singular focus on readiness, the panel won the admiration of families of many victims of the attacks, who saw commission members as more devoted to their cause and more sympathetic to their pain than others in government.

“You’ve been unlike any other commission,” said a tearful Mary Fetchet, who lost her son at the World Trade Center and who is director of a victims group, addressing commission members Monday.

“I mean, you didn’t just do the investigation and then release a report; you stuck with it for a full another year to make sure it was legislated and to get to where we are today, to really evaluate where we stand.”

The report card assigned letter grades in 41 categories, including border security to civil liberties protections.

Members directed some of their sharpest criticism at what they described as a failure to make sure federal domestic security money was spent wisely.

Beyond the way the money is distributed, Kean and the former vice chairman of the panel, former Democratic Rep. Lee H. Hamilton of Indiana, said local governments were squandering much of the money they got.

In an opinion column published Monday in the New York Times, Kean and Hamilton said the District of Columbia had used federal domestic security funds to “buy leather jackets and to send sanitation workers to self-improvement seminars.”

The city of Newark, N.J., bought air-conditioned garbage trucks, while Columbus, Ohio, used funds to purchase armor for fire department dogs.

“These are not the priorities of a nation under threat,” Kean and Hamilton said.

In their latest report, former commission members praised a measure passed by the House this year to change the way funds were allocated so that more money was earmarked for regions considered at greater risk of attack.

The Bush administration favors altering the funding formula to account for risk, McClellan said.

But a House Republican aide said that the threat-based allocation provision had been dropped from a House-Senate compromise on the bill, mainly because of opposition from senators from less-populous regions who objected to seeing funding for their states diminished.

The White House detailed billions spent in security in the United States and abroad. But although there is no official price tag for the recommendations, experts have said the outstanding recommendations of the Sept. 11 commission could cost billions more. For instance, some have estimated that utility companies would have to spend $300 million or more on each nuclear plant to protect against air attacks.

In other areas, the commission members said they continued to find breakdowns in the sharing of information among intelligence agencies, “inertia and complacency” undermining reforms at the FBI, and a failure to adopt common standards for handling prisoners.

“U.S. treatment of detainees has elicited broad criticism and makes it harder to build the necessary alliances to cooperate effectively with partners in a global war on terror,” the report said.

The highest mark in the report card -- an A minus -- was given for efforts to target terrorist financing. The commission noted that the government “has made significant strides in using terrorism finance as an intelligence tool,” but added that turf battles between the State and Treasury departments continued.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

It’s no honor roll

The commission that investigated the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks graded the government on how well it had or had not carried out the panel’s recommendations. Some of the grades:

A minus: Making efforts with other countries to crack down on terrorist financing.

B: Finding a balance at home between security and civil liberties.

C: Getting private businesses to be prepared to respond in case of an emergency.

D: Making improvements in screening checked bags and cargo on flights.

F: Helping emergency agencies acquire radios and other equipment that would let them communicate with each other during a disaster.

Incomplete: Revamping the CIA, including improvements in its use of human intelligence operations.

Source: Associated Press