WASHINGTON - Capping 18 months of work, the
bipartisan 9-11 Commission released its 567-page report
here on Thursday, and challenged President George W Bush
and Congress urgently to make sweeping changes to the
structure of the US intelligence community. One major
recommendation is sure to rankle the Pentagon and its
chief, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
The
report's central recommendations called for the creation
of a National Counter-Terrorism Center (NCTC) that would
feature joint operational planning and
intelligence-sharing across different government
agencies and, more controversial, the position of a
National Intelligence Director (NID) who would oversee
the 15 different agencies that make up Washington's vast
intelligence apparatus.
Such a post, which would
require confirmation by the US Senate and be given space
in the White House, is certain to be strongly resisted
by the Pentagon, which currently controls about 80% of
the estimated US$40 billion intelligence budget and
focuses most of those resources on spying on foreign
militaries rather than on suspected terrorist groups.
"Our reform recommendations are urgent," said
former Illinois governor James Thompson, one of the
Republican members of the 10-person National Commission
on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States. "They need
to be enacted, and enacted speedily, because if
something bad happens while these recommendations are
sitting there, the American people will quickly fix
political responsibility for failure, and that
responsibility may last for generations," he warned.
Bush met with the commission co-chairs, former
New Jersey Republican governor Tom Kean and former
Democratic congressman Lee Hamilton, in the White House
just before the report's official release, and praised
the group for "a really good job", promising to study
their "very solid, sound recommendations". His
Democratic rival for the presidency, Senator John Kerry,
issued a statement endorsing its conclusions and calling
for their urgent implementation.
"I received an
initial briefing on the report from Tom Kean and Lee
Hamilton this morning," Kerry said. "We have a big
agenda for reforms and no time to lose in tackling
them," he added, noting that Republican Senator John
McCain and Democratic Senator Joseph Lieberman intended
to introduce legislation that, if enacted, would
translate the key recommendations into law.
In a
joint press conference one hour later, McCain and
Lieberman said they will ask Congress to convene a
special session this autumn, if necessary, to move their
legislation.
The independent commission, whose
creation and mandate were initially resisted by the Bush
administration, reviewed tens of thousands of documents
and heard testimony from some 1,200 witnesses, including
Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney - who insisted,
however, on appearing jointly and behind closed doors -
as well as senior members of the Bush government and
that of his predecessor Bill Clinton.
The main
findings of the long-awaited report came as little
surprise, as much of it has leaked out since the
commission issued an initial staff report last month.
The commission said it found no evidence of an Iraqi
connection to the attacks of September 11, nor any
evidence of any "collaborative operational relationship"
between the al-Qaeda terrorist group and the government
of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein.
"Conversations, yes; but nothing concrete," said
Hamilton.
An alleged link between Saddam and
al-Qaeda was one of the Bush administration's
most-repeated arguments to justify attacking Iraq in
March 2003.
Similarly, the commission found no
evidence of a role by the governments of Saudi Arabia
and Iran with respect to the September 11 attacks,
although it did find evidence that Iran may have had an
operational relationship with al-Qaeda at one time - an
allegation that has already provoked renewed tensions
between Washington and Tehran.
"We don't know of
any current relationship," said Kean. "We do know that
when people wanted to get through Iran to Afghanistan to
meet with Osama bin Laden, including a number of the
[September 11] hijackers, they were able to do [that]
without marks in their passports that would indicate
they'd been through Iran. But there is no evidence
whatsoever, for instance, that Iran knew anything about
the attack on [September] 11 or certainly assisted it in
any way."
But the main thrust of the report was
on how the intelligence community failed to "connect the
dots" about the threat posed by al-Qaeda, and
specifically the hijackings of the jetliners used for
suicide attacks on New York and the Pentagon on
September 11, a plan that appears to have been hatched
as early as 1998, the report said.
"Ninety
percent of the facts that we knew about [al-Qaeda
leader] Osama bin Laden we knew in 1998," said former
Democratic senator Bob Kerrey, another commissioner.
"But the full story wasn't delivered until after
[September 11 because] it was held in classified
compartmentalized sections" of the government.
Many critics have charged that Washington failed
to detect and disrupt the attacks, which killed nearly
3,000 people, in major part because most US intelligence
resources were focused on potential conventional
military threats as opposed to unconventional threats,
such as those posed by al-Qaeda.
Indeed, the
commission identified 10 "unexploited opportunities"
before the attacks - four under the Clinton
administration and six in the first eight months of the
Bush administration - when, if the relevant agencies had
known what other agencies had known, the government
could have discovered, delayed, or disrupted the plot.
"We need changes in information sharing," said
Hamilton. "The United States government has access to
vast amounts of information, but it has a weak system of
processing and using [it]. 'Need to share' must replace
'need to know'."
That would be the primary
purpose of establishing the NCTC. As for the creation of
the NID, the consequences of such a move would be
enormous, not only altering the focus of US intelligence
gathering and reducing the Pentagon's control, but also
scrambling powerful and jealous congressional
committees, several of which oversee different parts of
the intelligence community.
The enormity of the
task prompted Kerry to say that, while "hopeful", he was
"not optimistic that these changes will be enacted prior
to another terrorist attack on the United States".
"It will require members of Congress to give up
committee assignments that ... they love," he said. "It
will require, in the government, people to give up
authority that they currently have over hiring budgets.
The Department of Defense, most notably, will be asked
to give up substantial authorities."
Indeed,
Rumsfeld has strongly opposed any move to create a NID,
an idea that has long been pushed by Brent Scowcroft,
the former national security adviser under former
president George H W Bush (1989-93), who chaired a
presidential commission on the subject in the late
1990s.
Until now, Rumsfeld has succeeded in
keeping the proposal at bay, but the commission's
weighing in so strongly on the question could help tip
the balance in Congress, if not in the administration.
The commission's work before now had already won
widespread praise, not only because of the exceptional
bipartisanship that characterized its public appearances
- a striking contrast to the increasingly bitter
partisan polarization taking place in Washington in an
election year - but also as a result of the strong
public backing it received from the families of the
victims of the September 11 attacks.
On several
occasions, the administration and the Republican
leadership in Congress were forced to cave in to the
commission's demands for documents or for an extension
in completing its work.
A survey by the Pew
Center for People and the Press released this week
indicated that more than 60% of the public had
confidence in the commission's work, compared with only
24% who did not - a level of support that commission
members clearly hope will be used to press Congress and
the administration on the reforms.
