9/11 Commission Rears Its Ugly Head

The 9/11 Commission, which has since gone private as a self-annointed panel of wisemen who are supposedly experts on organizational planning and the intelligence community from their years in the Senate or as lawyers, has announced that it is troubled by the lack of measures taken by the Bush administration and Congress to protect America.

The bipartisan panel plans to issue a report Monday assessing the federal government's response to the recommendations it made last year.

The group was created by Congress in 2002 to investigate aspects of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. It released its final report with a slew of recommendations in a nearly 570-page book in July 2004.

That slew of recommendations? In a 570 page book, 338 pages were narrative of what happened (not what went wrong, just what happened). Only a measley 90 pages contained analysis and recommendations. Richard Posner, a federal judge in Chicago and professor at the University of Chicago Law School (and part owner of the Becker-Posner blog) has this to say about the analysis and recommendations section.

Anyone who harbors hope that the pattern [of attacks] can be disrupted will read with mounting dismay the 90 pages of analysis and recommendations that follow the narrative part of the 9/11 Commission's report. For they will come to very little, even though they constitute virtually the entire analytical foundation of the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act. Even the prose sags, as the reader is treated to a barrage of bromides, such as "the American people are entitled to expect their government to do its ver best," or "we should reach out, listen to and work with other countries that can help" and "be generous and caring to our neighbors," or that we should supply the Middle East with "programs to bridge the digital divide and increase internet access" - the last an unconsciously ironic suggestion, given that encrypted email is an effective medium of clandestine communication.

Posner even preempts the Commission's complaints. This from the article on how troubled the commission is:

The two men, and the other members of the former commission, also want funding for first responders to be distributed based on risk -- with more likely targets receiving a bigger chunk of the funding -- rather than on a per capita or geographical basis.

Posner:

Strict proportionate equality would indeed be arbitrary. But not only is information lacking that would enable precise allocative criteria to be formulated; in addition, to make Washington and New York impregnable, so that terrorists can blow up Kansas City with impunity, wouldn't do us any good (the psychological impact of striking the American heartland might be even greater than than that of another attack on the East Coast). This is one of the abiding problems of preventing surprise attacks: one cannot be strong everywhere, but if resources are therefore so heavily concentrated on the likeliest targets that others are unprotected, the latter will become inviting targets.

[...]

Illustrating the psychological and political difficulty of taking seriously threats that haven't materialized in the past, the recommendations in the commission's report are oriented toward preventing what is already rather unlikely - a more or less exact repetition of 9/11.

Posner also addresses the issue of creation of the position of Director of National Intelligence. CNN hails this as the only case of the President listening to the commission, but Posner points out the absurdity of how it was created. DNI has deputies that are reporting to multiple bosses in rivalous agencies, including Defense, Justice, Homeland Security and CIA - each with consistently overlapping duties. In other words, a bureaucratic nightmare.

Which brings us to the real problem surrounding the 9/11 Commission - the media's complete lack of anything resembling critical analysis of the recommendations, accepting its findings as if it were a decree handed down by God.

Between issuance of the 9/11 Commission's report and the enactment just a few months later of the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Acto of 2004, based largely on the commission's recommendations, there was no sustained public debate over the merits of the recommendations. They were taken for granted; critics such as Henry Kissinger were ignored.

Kerry seized on these findings, declaring them the word of the Almighty during the election last year, so Bush had no choice but to show full support as well.

Of course, CNN continues this uncritical trend still today. I like Tom Kean, but it's hard to do so when overly pretentious nonsense like this comes out of his mouth.

Added Kean, "God help us if we have another attack and we haven't done some of these things."

Then there's this:

The United States also needs to repair its image in the world, Kean said.

"We've got to talk about the kind of image we have and the things we do to create that image," said Kean. "If we don't, there's going to be more terrorists created than the ones we're now killing."

And the media just laps this stuff right up.