Posted by Frank James at 6:04 pm CDT
Today has been a time to remember the dead and the injured of 9/11, and their families and friends, and all the lost possibilities.
(Former 9/11 Commission Vice chairman Lee Hamilton, right, and Thomas Kean, chairman, speak at the National Press Club in Washington on the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)
But in Washington, it was also a time to consider the nation’s response to the still mind-blowing tragedy. And that reaction, according to the two retired politicians who led the national self-examination into 9/11 remains significantly lacking.New Jersey’s former Republican Gov. Thomas Kean and former Indiana Democratic congressman Lee Hamilton were at the National Press Club today, bringing attention to the yet unfinished work of fixing national weaknesses exposed by 9/11.
Kean, who chaired the 9/11 panel, and Hamilton, the vice chair, didn’t hide their great frustration with the lack of progress on many of the recommendations their committee made.
It was the frustration born from the knowledge that 9/11 didn’t really change everything, not in Washington.
It certainly didn’t change politics-as-usual in Washington or the lack of urgency that exists when accountability for making the changes is hard to pin down.
“Now look, you’ve got a lot of good people in this city,” Hamilton said. “They’re working very hard on some of these problems.
“But like everything in this town, there are many, many items on the agenda. And our view is a simple one. It is that there is nothing, nothing, nothing more important on the agenda of any policymaker than to make the people of this country more secure.
“And so things like the radio spectrum being devoted to first responders, my goodness, here we are five years, and the police the fire and the health people still cannot talk to one another at the scene of a disaster.
“I mean, where in the world have we been for five years?”
Hamilton was talking about the way first responders often still can’t communicate with each other because of what’s called the interoperability problem, meaning that because their radios use different frequencies, they can’t talk to each other.
Experts are fairly sure this led to many firefighter deaths in New York on 9/11. Many New York police officers had gotten the word that the towers were unstable and to evacuate them. But the firefighters couldn’t hear the warnings.
To solve this problem, some of the broadcast spectrum has to be freed up. But television broadcasters have managed to cling to this spectrum, pushing off its return to the American public for years. Legislation would require broadcasters to relinquish the spectrum by 2009. But that’s not soon enough for Kean and Hamilton.
“Now, does anybody think there’s not going to be some sort of a disaster between now and 2009, and that lives aren’t going to be lost if people can’t talk to each other?” Kean asked.
“So our strong recommendation, and it seemed to us like a commonsense one, is we do it immediately; that we lay aside some spectrum for these people who, after all, their job is saving our lives. And we got to give them the tools to do it, and the spectrum is the number one tool they need right now.”
Another recommendation: A disproportionate share of homeland-security funding should be directed to the cities most at risk like New York and Washington.
Again, politics have taken precedence over what Kean and Hamilton call common sense, with lawmakers from smaller cities and states making sure their constituents got a share of homeland security cash even if such places weren’t at risk from terrorism or even major natural disasters.
“If you had asked any of us, I think, on the commission when we made our recommendations, ‘What was the easiest one of all the recommendations? We would have said, ‘Well, probably to give homeland-security money on the basis of risk.’ That just sounded so logical and so easy,” Kean said.
“And yet five years later we’re still not doing it. There is a bill that’s passed the House, been pending forever in the Senate. And you look at the list of what the Senate leaders say is a priority, I never see that one on the list. And yet shouldn’t we be giving Washington, New York and the areas we know the terrorists want to attack the money? It just doesn’t make any sense to us.
“…The basic point is, to me, that five years later, although we’ve done a lot of good things and there are a lot of good people working very hard on this — I don’t want to leave that impression that they’re not — but five years later there is still so much left undone that ought to be done.
“And what I got — I was talking to Lee this morning, and I said, you know, one of the things that I find very frustrating is we’ve got a congressional election this year, as you know, and I can’t find a candidate in either party who will look at me and say, ‘I’m not for your 41 recommendations.’ ” said Kean.
“So if everybody in Congress is for all 41 recommendations, what happened? How come they’re not passed? How come the country isn’t moving further on these things?” he asked.
Here’s a question Kean didn’t ask. Will it take another spectacular attack, perhaps with a nuclear bomb in a major city—the nightmare scenario according to Kean—before these weaknesses are finally addressed?
