History Repeats Itself

5:12 pm EST December 5th, 2005 | Terrorism | 2 Comments

9/12/01

But on Wednesday, two former senators, the bipartisan co-chairs of a Defense Department-chartered commission on national security, spoke with something between frustration and regret about how White House officials failed to embrace any of the recommendations to prevent acts of domestic terrorism delivered earlier this year.

Bush administration officials told former Sens. Gary Hart, D-Colo., and Warren Rudman, R-N.H., that they preferred instead to put aside the recommendations issued in the January report by the U.S. Commission on National Security/21st Century. Instead, the White House announced in May that it would have Vice President Dick Cheney study the potential problem of domestic terrorism — which the bipartisan group had already spent two and a half years studying — while assigning responsibility for dealing with the issue to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, headed by former Bush campaign manager Joe Allbaugh.

The Hart-Rudman Commission had specifically recommended that the issue of terrorism was such a threat it needed far more than FEMA’s attention.

Before the White House decided to go in its own direction, Congress seemed to be taking the commission’s suggestions seriously, according to Hart and Rudman. “Frankly, the White House shut it down,” Hart says. “The president said ‘Please wait, we’re going to turn this over to the vice president. We believe FEMA is competent to coordinate this effort.’ And so Congress moved on to other things, like tax cuts and the issue of the day.”

Four years later? U.S. given ‘more F’s than A’s’ on terror preparation

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2 Responses to “History Repeats Itself”

  1. randy says:
    December 5, 2005 at 5:12 pm

    “Had they adopted every recommendation we had put forward at that time I don’t think it would have changed what happened,” Rudman says. “There wasn’t enough time to enact everything…”

    “Could this have been prevented?” Hart asks. “The answer is, ‘We’ll never know.’ Possibly not.” It was a struggle to convince President Clinton of the need for such a commission, Hart says. He urged Clinton to address this problem in ’94 and ’95, but Clinton didn’t act until 1998, prompted by politics. “He saw Gingrich was about to do it, so he moved to collaborate,” Hart says. “Seven years had gone by since the end of the Cold War. It could have been much sooner.”

    http://www.salon.com/politics/feature/2001/09/12/bush/index1.html

  2. BD says:
    December 6, 2005 at 1:12 pm

    Is that a rebuttal or a deflection? The point is no longer “which administration dropped the ball before the attacks,” the point is that the current administration refuses to act on the information even after 9/11.

    And if, God forbid, we get to the next administration without these safeguards in place…and that administration fails to act as well…I’ll feel the same way no matter which party it is.