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CIAO DATE: 10/04
Not Worth a Blue Ribbon
On The Issues
August 2004
Reuel Marc Gerecht
Abstract
The 9/11 Commission report fails to offer effective solutions to problems in American intelligence, concentrating on new bureaucratic structures rather than on revitalizing the clandestine service to infiltrate and destroy terrorist organizations.
The 9/11 Commission says it wants to have a national debate about its report. Actually, that’s not quite true. It would prefer that the Bush administration and Congress, feeling the heat of its bipartisan mandate, submit quickly and completely to its collective and deliberate judgments. The Bush administration apparently would rather not fold so quickly. Yet Senator John Kerry’s immediate embrace of the lengthy document and its recommendations, and the commissioners’ intention to turn themselves into a continuing, nationwide road show, have made this report, like the commission’s televised hearings, into a political drama with possible repercussions on the elections in November. Senator Kerry would love to berate the president, as well as the Republican-controlled Congress, for dallying with America’s security and the war against terrorism, which will probably be the decisive issue in the presidential campaign. The administration is running for cover. It has embraced the core recommendations of the commission—the creation of a new national intelligence director and a new National Counterterrorism Center—without accepting all the bureaucratic rewiring and fiscal and hiring-and-firing authority that the commission wants to give to this intelligence czar.
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