Kudos to 9/11 Commission for Ignoring

WSJ’s Childish Pounding

By M.P. Prabhakaran

            Among the many praises that can be showered on the 9/11 Commission, this one should stand out: it treated with contempt all criticisms hurled at it by The Wall Street Journal. One hopes that the contemptuous treatment continues with regard to the Journal’s August 4, 2004 editorial also. The editorial, entitled “Rush to Czardom,” wants the 9/11 Commissioners to “remove themselves to an undisclosed location until, say, November 2.” The czardom the Journal sarcastically refers to is the national intelligence directorate the 9/11 Commission has strongly urged the President and Congress to create so all the 15 intelligence agencies in the country, sometimes working at cross-purposes, can be brought under the control of one entity.

            This is the same paper that, only a few months ago, had chastised the Commission for requesting the Congress to allow two more months to complete its work. The request was made when the Commission realized that the enormous work it was mandated to do by Congress, of investigating “facts and circumstances relating to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001,” could not be satisfactorily completed before the deadline. The deadline was May, 2004. What was the Journal’s reaction to that request? “If the commission … can’t finish by May, then we’d suggest a compromise: Close up shop between now and November, and report the findings after the election when they can’t be leaked selectively for partisan purposes or spun in the heat of a campaign. Otherwise, get it over with,” it wrote in its editorial of January 30, 2004. The contemptible title of the editorial is “The 9/11 Ambush.”

            The White House and many Republicans in Congress, especially House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, also opposed extending the deadline. Only in the face of public outcry did they decide to give in. The extension was granted on February 4, 2004. Then the Journal decided to give a spin to the extended date: “[The Commission’s] final report is now due on July 26, two months after its original deadline and the same day that the Democratic Party convention begins in Boston. We doubt that’s a coincidence either,” it said in its March 22, 2004 editorial, “Sins of Commission.” To the paper’s disappointment, the report was released on July 22, four days before the convention began.

            One has to be harebrained to suggest that the bipartisan Commission, whose chairman is Republican and which has equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats on it, set its agenda to suit the need of the Democratic Party. Is the Journal saying that the five Republican members of the Commission are pushovers?

            The same editorial says elsewhere: “The 9/11 Commission has … been driven from the start by meaner political calculations: To appease the demands of those (few) victims’ families looking for someone to blame, and to provide a vehicle to embarrass the Bush Administration.”

            That accusation has been specifically addressed in the Commission’s report: “Our aim has not been to assign individual blame. Our aim has been to provide the fullest possible account of the events surrounding 9/11 and to identify lessons learned.” In other words, appeasing the demands of a “few” was the last thing the Commission had on its mind when it went about doing its job.

            It may be noted that the parenthetical insertion of the word few in the editorial was not unintentional. The allusion is to the four widows of New Jersey, but for whose relentless campaign the Bush administration and the Republican majority Congress would not have established this Commission. And but for their constant pressure the administration would not have yielded to the various legitimate demands of the Commission with regard to producing documents and witnesses. They are among the hundreds of women who became widows when terrorists destroyed the World Trade Center. They are Kristin Breitweiser, Patty Casazza, Lorie Van Auken and Mindy Kleinberg. They did not undertake the campaign “looking for someone to blame,” as the Journal says. In the words of Breitweiser, “We simply wanted to know why our husbands were killed. Why they went to work one day and didn’t come home.”

Four Moms from New Jersey

            The Journal has tried to besmirch them from the very beginning of their campaign. But the 9/11 Commission, like millions around the country, has been deeply appreciative of their work. The Commission was referring to them when it said in its report: “We thank the families of 9/11, whose persistence and dedication helped create the Commission. They have been with us each step of the way, as partners and witnesses. They know better than any of us the importance of the work we have undertaken.” The four, in the course of their campaign, came to be endearingly called Jersey Girls, after Bruce Springsteen’s famous song of the title ‘Jersey Girl.’ But they prefer being called just “Four Moms from New Jersey.”

            The Journal had feared all along that the Commission would blame the intelligence failures that led to 9/11 entirely on the Bush administration. That was the reason behind its insistence that the report be released only after the election, not before. Though the paper would have been very happy to see the blame placed squarely on the Clinton administration, it must have felt somewhat relieved when it read in the final report that “Terrorism was not the overriding national security concern for the U.S. government under either the Clinton or the pre-9/11 Bush administration.”

            This evenhandedness in approach, plus the fact that the report met with acclaim across the country, made the Journal change its tune. It acknowledged, grudgingly though, that the “final report seems on our first reading to be better than the process that produced it” (“Pre-emption Commission,” editorial, July 23, 2004). Even this grudging acknowledgment would not have evoked the derisive laughter it did, if it were not preceded by the shameless boast that “perhaps our pounding helped.” The paper may please note that its pounding was laughed away by the Commissioners as childish.

            Surprisingly, it has resumed its childish pounding, this time directed at the Commission’s campaign to get its recommendations implemented without delay. The Journal is very upset that, unlike many commissioners in the past, the 9/11 Commissioners did not pack up and leave Washington soon after submitting their report. They stayed on, determined to press Congress to deliberate upon their recommendations right away. That determination can be gauged from what the Commission’s chairman, former Governor Thomas H. Kean of New Jersey, himself said just two days after the report was released. “If the Congress and the President delay unnecessarily …, I think they are going to be held responsible by the American people, especially if the experts are right and there is another terrorist attack,” he told a small group of reporters in Washington.

            His sense of urgency was also shared by the Jersey Girls. Just the day before, Ms. Breitweiser had said to Wayne Parry, an Associated Press reporter: “The clock is ticking. It would be such a travesty if we have another attack and we can’t say on that day, ‘At least we put them in place and it saved lives.’” To this, Ms. Van Auken added: “We feel it’s really important that our Congressmen and the President get behind making these recommendations law. Despite the fact that there is a Presidential election, politics can’t trump national security.”

            The words of Ms. Kleinberg, the third Jersey Girl who spoke to the same AP reporter, carry an ominous warning. “Before Sept. 11, we had a high-threat period that summer,” she said. “[CIA Director] George Tenet went on vacation. The President went on vacation. This feels similar. Where is their sense of urgency? What do we say to the next victims? ‘Sorry, we got busy?’” The Wall Street Journal, which tells the 9/11 Commissioners to get lost until the November 2 elections, may want to answer that question.

            Does the Journal realize that, when it tells Chairman Kean and “some of his more vocal colleagues [read Democratic Party members of the Commission]” not to forget “that intelligence is serious business, too serious to be ‘reformed’ in a rush,” it is bringing to mind the picture of the boy who wanted to teach his grandparents how to perform intercourse? If it is so concerned that “al Qaeda would dearly like to strike here in the coming months in hopes of influencing our election the way they appear to have done in Spain,” it should be campaigning to get the intelligence reforms proposed by the 9/11 Commissioners put in place well before the election.