That the 9/11 Commission was ever established and managed to obtain interviews with Bush administration officials is due in large part to the families who lost loved ones in the terrorist attacks. Rozen reports that they are pleased with the report’s findings, but are now focused on on rallying support to implement the report’s recommendations.
Laura Rozen writes on national security and foreign policy issues from Washington, D.C., and for her weblog War And Piece.
Inspired by a shared sense of urgency to prevent future terror attacks, family members of those who died on 9/11 set aside earlier calls for the commission to assign individual accountability for the failure to prevent the 9/11 attacks, and largely embraced the panel’s final report. They vowed to work with the 10 commission members over the coming months to lobby Congress and the public to ensure the report’s recommendations are signed into law.
“Will this report answer every single one of the questions that I have?” asked family steering committee member Mindy Kleinberg, after watching a two-hour press conference to mark the 9/11 Commission’s final report release at Washington DC’s gilded Mellon Auditorium Thursday. “Probably not. But I think we have to realize that getting some of these recommendations in place before the next attack is a matter of life or death. It’s three years out since the last attacks, and the time for Congress to study and study reforms is past. I don’t think we can wait. We can’t let this just sit.”
Fellow family member Steve Push, whose wife died on the American Airlines flight 77 which was flown into the Pentagon, echoed Kleinberg, in calling for the public to demand American political leaders adopt the report’s recommendations. Those recommendations include calling for “someone to be in charge” of all of the United States' 15 intelligence agencies, in the form of the creation of the post of a cabinet-level director of national intelligence, and the creation of a counterterrorism agency within the FBI, with a more intelligence and analytical focus than currently exists at the Bureau.
Pressure Needed To Implement Reforms
“We need to do something soon,” Push warned. Like many family members and commissioners who spoke at the report release, Push spoke of another terror attack as coming soon. “It’s going to take a lot of intense public pressure to get these changes made.”
Push expressed the conviction that such public pressure could be generated with more of the grassroots campaigning he and other family members have adopted not only to get the commission created, but to help it win more funding, access and time to complete its work. Noting that House speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., has already expressed lack of support for the commission’s recommendation for the director of national intelligence post, Push said it would be up to the public to rally for action. “Two years ago, there was never going to be a commission. We were never going to get more than $3 million for it. And the commission would not get more time" he said. “Well, these things can change.”
While at many instances over the past year and a half, family members have expressed the desire for the commission not only to make the kinds of recommendations for intelligence reform and government restructuring that the panel ultimately issued, but to also identify individual officials who should be held accountable for the government’s failure to protect their loved ones, there was no sign of any complaints at the report release Thursday.
“These issues were distant and bureaucratic for me on September 10, 2001,” Push said. “I was forced to confront that reality on September 11. Americans have to realize getting these changes is an urgent issue. It’s about reorganizing the government to protect its people from terrorism. The government failed to do that on September 11th. Nothing else matters—not education, not health care, if the American government can’t protect the people.”
Traction Outlook: Good
At the press event, commission members spoke of the urgency of the reforms they recommend to restructure a U.S. government national security bureaucracy that is still organized for the Cold War. They described the failure to prevent the 9/11 attacks as, above all, the result of a failure of imagination. But most of all, they said, what they were recommending was not only moving of bureaucratic “boxes,” but changes in the people's thinking—people in government agencies, in Congress and in the public.
With that in mind, the 9/11 Commission has taken upon itself the job of recommending a vision for how the U.S. government should be restructured for the post 9/11-era. And unlike dozens of blue-ribbon panels, commissions and task forces that have gone before and made some of the same recommendations, the 9/11 Commission’s recommendations are almost certain to gain real traction and be the catalyst for real reform of the U.S. national security bureaucracy—if for no other reason than the event that brought this commission into existence were the 9/11 attacks themselves.
“Some of these recommendations have to be made three or four times before they actually get traction,” said Stewart Baker, former general counsel of the National Security Agency, who is currently serving as general counsel to the WMD commission. “Even if they end up repeating earlier recommendations, this could be finally what makes people believe it’s inevitable and have to finally bow to it.” Former CIA director Stansfield Turner agrees.
“Both the candidate and the incumbent president have more or less committed themselves to some kind of reform,” Turner said in a July 20 interview. “On top of that, the recommendation for the creation of a director of national intelligence separate from the head of the CIA, is not a traumatic change. This is only saying we’re going to slice responsibilities between them.”
Former NSC official James Lewis, now a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said it’s too early to tell whether the heated political environment in which the commission report is being released will overwhelm its recommendations. But he suggests the commission’s recommendations could get further traction if commission members are nominated for key intelligence community positions, including ones they recommend be created.
“The timing is a little awkward for the report and a lot depends on what happens to it and what happens to the commission members afterwards,” Lewis said. “Take the example of the Rumsfeld space commission. So Rumsfeld chairs a commission that looks at space policy that came out in January 2001. And then Rumsfeld goes to a position where he can be very influential” on that issue.
“This [9/11] report in some respects is coming out too early,” Lewis added. “But if someone on the commission ends up in a position of influence, that would change things. There are certainly people on the panel who have been interested” in serving as director of central intelligence, he said.
Both commission chair Thomas Kean and commission member Jamie Gorelick have both been mentioned as potential contenders for top intelligence posts, depending on who wins the elections.
Above The Partisan Struggle
The panel studiously declined to further fuel the partisan debate in which it found itself releasing its final report. The commission’s report comes in the midst of a season of investigations into intelligence failure, and a presidential election campaign that has made our shared national tragedy at times seem like a hotly debated political football. Family members said they desperately appreciated the panel’s efforts to keep the focus on the changes needed, and not on politics.
“That was a stroke of brilliance,” said Kristen Breitweiser, one of the most visible of the “Jersey Girls,” as she and some of the other women who were made widows by the World Trade Center attacks have become known. At the press conference’s end, Breitweiser could be found in the back of the vaulted auditorium, already deep into the footnotes of the 567 page report. Another reporter asked her how she felt after her long journey lobbying Congress and the White House to bring the commission into existence, and then lobbying the commission to be more aggressive in demanding access to the more the two and a half million government documents the panel ultimately reviewed.
“Inspired and motivated,” Breitweiser said. “Listening to the commissioners express their commitment to ensure results is very inspiring and very refreshing. We are committed to follow through, to make sure these changes are made.”
“It is very rewarding for the families to know the next attack may be averted,” because of their work, Breitweiser said. “It makes me feel like my husband’s death was not in vain.”
Through such committed activism by the families to get the commission created and keep its profile so visible, the U.S. government may finally be thrust into a process of reform and even reinvention for the vastly changed security landscape. That may be the most meaningful legacy the families of 9/11 can leave the rest of us. That the independent 9/11 commission has managed to tune out the white noise of partisan debate to write the definitive common national history of the 9/11 attacks—and a consensus blueprint for future reform—is its own significant achievement.
