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America — still unprepared, still in danger
April 1, 2004 Thursday

The 9/11 commissioners have been taking a good long look
over their shoulders at whether the Clinton administration
for eight years, and the Bush administration for eight
months, were derelict in their attentions to the terrorist
threat before Sept. 11, 2001, and whether that tragedy could
have been pre-empted.

It is an impressive and knowledgeable panel that appears to
have been diligent in its private investigations, capped by
two days of gripping public testimony last week by the
nation's foreign policy cognoscenti.

Now comes the more critical part of the commission's work,
as the clock ticks toward July 26, when it must deliver a
report that not only chronicles any past deficiencies but
offers recommendations that would prevent a recurrence. The
interim reports of the commission suggest that there were
missteps, miscalculations and miscommunications under both
the Clinton and Bush administrations.

As far back as 1996, the Clinton administration began to
focus on Osama bin Laden, but plans to eliminate him were
postponed or discarded for operational and political
reasons. For similar reasons, reprisal raids were not
carried out after terrorist attacks on U.S. installations. A
disabling lack of coordination between intelligence and
security agencies such as the FBI and CIA continued into the
Bush administration, so much so that top security officials
were unaware of the presence of the terrorist hijackers in
the United States before the 9/11 attacks.

The Bush administration record is under particular attack by
Richard Clarke, former White House counterterrorism chief.
In testimony before the commission, he argued that an
administration "must act on threats before they happen" and
be prepared to move "on a low threshold of evidence, feel
free to attack terrorist groups, feel free to use covert
military action against those that threaten the U.S."

Clarke is angrily impatient with what he perceives as
bureaucratic bungling, military caution and presidential
reticence in both administrations. Ironically, he deplores
President Bush's operation in Iraq, although most of the
public criticism against Bush is for taking the very
pre-emptive action against Saddam Hussein that Clarke
recommended against Osama bin Laden. The intelligence about
weapons of mass destruction in Iraq on which Bush acted
clearly turned out to be false, even though the U.N. and
many of its member countries also believed it. But one thing
Bush can hardly be faulted for in Iraq is acting on a
potential threat he believed to be real before it happened
or with a "low threshold of evidence."

If the 9/11 commission finds that the response to al-Qaida's
threat may have been lacking in timeliness or forcefulness,
it would confirm similar earlier conclusions. In 1999, a
commission on national security, co-chaired by former Sens.
Warren Rudman and Gary Hart, warned that "America will
become increasingly vulnerable to hostile attack on our
homeland." States, terrorists and other disaffected groups,
it predicted, "will acquire weapons of mass destruction and
mass disruption, and some will use them. Americans will
likely die on American soil, possibly in large numbers." The
commission specifically warned against "nontraditional attacks."

The warning gained little publicity and little government
heed. But it went on to produce, in February of 2001, a
"road map" for imperative change in national security that
made sweeping recommendations for meeting the looming
threat. Some, like creation of a Homeland Security Agency,
were implemented. Others, involving restructuring of, and
new resources for, such agencies as the State and Defense
Departments, the National Security Council and intelligence
agencies, have not.

After 9/11, Rudman and Hart co-chaired a Council on Foreign
Relations task force that produced an updating report
ominously titled: "America -- Still Unprepared, Still in
Danger." In an interview last year, Rudman told me that
while there had been some improvements since 9/11, the
United States remained "dangerously ill prepared to handle a
catastrophic attack on American soil."

It will be tempting for politicians in a presidential
election year to use the report of the 9/11 commission to
berate each other's deficiencies. The commission should
certainly not disregard past failures in America's
national-security system. But its greatest service would be
to infuse with new urgency recommendations for reform and
improvement of that system. What Americans need from their
leaders is focus on what must now be done, rather than
preoccupation with what was done. John Hughes is editor and
chief operating officer of the Deseret Morning News. He is a
former editor of the Christian Science Monitor, which
syndicates this column. E-mail: