9/11 Commission Day

A lack of seriousness, the chasm between frivolous campaign rhetoric and real-world governing, and the politicizing of our national security — the one subject always claimed to be above such unseemliness … right before being politicized. These all figure in the theater that is Day One of new Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s “First 100 Hours” blitz: The day when House Democrats undertake to make good — sort of — on their electoral pledge to enact the yet unfulfilled aspirations of the 9/11 Commission.

It is soapbox stripped of substance, and with no small amount of hypocrisy thrown in for good measure.

Speaker Pelosi, it goes without saying, has already abandoned the promise of “open, full and fair debate” — campaign posturing that indicted the very brass-knuckles legislating the ongoing blitz exemplifies. Generally speaking, as National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru observed last week, it is true that little is served by Republican grousing over machine-politics-as-usual. Such practices, though, are worth pausing over here. For in unilaterally ramming through this particular bill, liberal Democrats illustrate how hollow their encomiums to the 9/11 Commission have been. The Commission, for them, has been a crop for whipping the Bush administration, not a font of security wisdom.

After all, the ballyhooed panel’s watchword was “bipartisanship.” Not only did the Commission regard unanimity among its Republican and Democrat members as its signal achievement; it further insisted that its own recommendations, like national security itself, were oh-so-above anything as crass as partisanship.

The Commission maintained, for example, that the staff of new committees dedicated to public safety must be “nonpartisan” (Final Report 421). It decreed that, no matter how one-sided the majorities in any session of Congress might be, “the majority party’s representation on [an intelligence] committee must never exceed the minority’s representation by more than one.” (Id.) The message was crystal clear: The life-and-death decisions of these bodies were far too significant to be determined without equal input from both sides, much less to be rigged.

So now, in her first official national-security act, the new Speaker will honor the Commission by making a mockery of this central tenet. Determined to fulfill — or, rather, appear to fulfill — an ill-considered pledge to pass the Commission’s heretofore un-enacted prescriptions, Pelosi and company will pound home legislation with absolutely zero consideration by the committees on homeland security (for whose creation the Commission agitated) and intelligence — committees over which the Commission obsessed precisely because few members of Congress have expertise in the relevant areas.

(Of course, one member who does have such expertise is Rep. Jane Harman (D., Calif.), who was ranking member on the Intelligence Committee in pre-Pelosi days, but who has been denied the committee chair in the new majority because Pelosi deemed her insufficiently partisan. Instead, the new Speaker chose to install Rep. Silvestre Reyes (D., Tex.), who promptly embarrassed the caucus with his alarming ignorance about the divide in the Muslim world between Sunnis and Shiites.)

Fools Speed Ahead

The peremptory call to adopt more of the Commission’s recommendations seems especially foolish at the moment. For its been only a few days since John Negroponte announced that, after less than two years on the job (i.e., right in the middle of a seismic restructuring of the $40-plus-billion intelligence community, and while the nation is at war, no less), he is vacating the perch atop the Commission’s crown jewel, the National Intelligence Directorate.

The Commission, you see, decided that the underperformance of U.S. intelligence must have been a function of its corporate organizational chart. Thus, so the argument went, such problems as “group think” and lack of information-sharing would somehow be solved by … more bureaucracy. To address the sprawl of over 15 diverse components within an intelligence community lumbering under the coordination, but not the control, of the CIA director, the Commission agitated for the creation of yet another component. The leadership of a director of National Intelligence with his own new fiefdom, it hypothesized, would better coordinate the coordination.

Predictably, rather than streamlining, the result has been mission confusion and bureaucratic bloat. DNI Negroponte has been sharply criticized on both sides of the political aisle for empire-building — at over 1,500 members, his staff grew to over twice the size and several times the budget originally anticipated (and, remember, that’s after less than two years). The DNI, moreover, is now plagued by the same impossible burdens that, historically, have undermined more than a few CIA directors: responsibility without authority and more hats — coordinator, analyst, and top presidential adviser — than even the most dedicated, sleep-deprived public servant can competently wear.

Small wonder, then, that thoughtful, nonpartisan experts like Judge Richard A. Posner and Ivan Eland have forcefully called for a reassessment of the Commission’s chimera. As Jessica Mathews, president of the left-leaning Carnegie Endowment for International Peace recently observed, “I don’t think this is a Negroponte issue[.]…The model that Congress adopted was a mistake. It does build a bureaucracy on top of a bureaucracy.”

It has long been obvious that the fawning done over the Commission was unwarranted. The relative tameness of its final report dimmed memories of the partisan circus into which its public hearings and media grandstanding had routinely devolved. Laboring under Commissioner Jamie Gorelick’s blatant conflict of interest, the panel whitewashed the infamous “wall” between intelligence and law-enforcement — a structural pre-9/11 impediment to competent intelligence analysis far more damaging than the arrangement of the deck chairs that so consumed the Commission … and the Congress that rushed headlong in an election year to adopt the proposed reorganization. And, as former FBI Director Louis Freeh has argued, the Commission failed adequately to investigate Able Danger, the military-intelligence program that may have identified some of the 9/11 hijackers through data-mining. (Which suggests, yet again, that “intelligence failure” was the fall-out not of disorganization or incapacity, but of a governmental ethos that elevated hyperbolic privacy concerns over public safety — an ethos whose apotheosis was the self-same wall.)

Politics vs. Prevention

All of these factors, coupled with the self-evident imperative of averting future terrorist attacks, supply ample justification for the new Congress to be revisiting the 9/11 Commission’s proposals. But that would be for the purpose of scrutinizing them carefully, removed finally from 2004’s immense political pressure to adopt them. It would not be to slam even more of them through.

That, though, is the final irony of “The First Hundred Hours — Day One.” The Democrats are not really going to enact all of the Commission’s recommendations after all. Several remaining proposals, it turns out, have to do with Congress’s own perks. Our legislature was typically indignant about everyone else’s pre-9/11 misfeasance and the consequent need to spank them with the Commission’s report. But, you’ll be shocked to learn, it took quite a different tack when it came to the Commission’s vigorous criticism of Congress’s own dismal performance and need to reorganize itself.

The Commission, for example, said the new homeland-security committees it prescribed should have exclusive jurisdiction over matters related to homeland-security agencies. It also maintained that the total amount of government spending on intelligence should be declassified. Now that the Democrats are governing rather than campaigning, they’ve apparently decided that these issues are not so “black and white,” as one leadership aide has confided. Rather (whaddya know!), “there really is a lot of gray[.]” So what promised to be a simple matter — just enact the Commission’s prescriptions — isn’t so simple: Democrats, reportedly, are still feverishly negotiating what should be in and what should be out. All that seems certain is that their bill will include such things as “interoperability” of communications equipment and, are you ready?, whistleblower protection for airport screeners.

That’s telling, isn’t it? Screeners, of course, need whistleblower protection so we can all rest assured that nothing untoward — like developing an accurate profile which notes that Islamic terrorists tend to be, well, Islamic — goes on at our airports. And the communications equipment at issue is for first-responders. Primarily, these are the rescue personnel who get to the scene after a terrorist attack has already happened. Yes, it is important that we try to avoid a reprise of the 9/11 communications debacle (which is why Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff has made interoperability a priority for some time). But our focus, post-9/11, is supposed to be preventing terrorist acts from happening in the first place.

Doing that, however, involves such initiatives as: killing and capturing al Qaeda terrorists in Iraq, from which Democrats want to “redeploy”; the NSA’s terrorist surveillance program for intercepting al Qaeda’s international communications, which Democrats oppose; and reauthorization of the Patriot Act, against which Democrats fought tooth-and-nail — to the point that their new senate majority leader, Harry Reid (D.-NV), once bragged about having “killed” it. (Happily, he was wrong.)

Clearly, Democrats got into their heads that a 9/11 Commission Day suited Speaker Pelosi’s fortnight coronation, a tone-setter for their national-security agenda.

It’s a tone-setter alright.

 — Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.