Panel Isn’t Going Away -- It’s Going on the Offensive

Blue-ribbon committees usually produce long reports that assign blame, and then go quietly out of business.

But Thursday, the commission on the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 boldly defied those rules: It refused to assign blame -- and, more importantly, it refused to go out of business.

The commission’s 10 members said they planned to spend the next 12 months traveling the nation demanding that politicians carry out most of their 41 recommendations.

So for the remainder of this election year, the political landscape will include a new and unpredictable factor: a bipartisan commission pressing presidential candidates for action on the hot-button issue of guarding against the next terrorist attack.

Earlier studies on the terrorist threat “were ignored,” former New Jersey Gov. Thomas H. Kean said. “We are determined as a commission not to let that happen.”

So far, at least, the effect appears to have put President Bush on the defensive -- and to have handed his Democratic rival, Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), an opportunity to question the president’s record.

The commission’s decision to avoid assigning blame for the 2001 terrorist attacks was a boon to Bush, who had been in office for eight months at the time. But its decision to press for sweeping organizational changes in the government’s intelligence agencies put the onus for action on the president, who has resisted such proposals.

The president received Kean and Vice Chairman Lee H. Hamilton, a former Democratic congressman from Indiana, at the White House on Thursday morning and praised the commission for “making very solid, sound recommendations.”

“I assured them that where government needs to act, we will,” Bush said.

But Bush and his aides appeared to resist the commission’s plea for quick action.

“People should recognize that we’re talking about pretty fundamental changes here,” national security advisor Condoleezza Rice said. “It only makes sense to try and understand the implications of them before you rush headlong one way.”

Kerry, who was campaigning in Detroit, struck a deliberately bipartisan note, saying: “This is not a time for bickering. It is not a time for politics.... This is a time to act -- now.” But his principal campaign advisor on foreign policy, former National Security Council official Rand Beers, displayed less restraint.

“This president has had an opportunity to implement this agenda since the 11th of September,” Beers said of the commission’s recommendations. “There was no reason ... the president sitting in the Oval Office couldn’t move forward to enact this.... I think the president should be held accountable if he doesn’t move forward.”

On at least one of the commission’s major recommendations -- creation of a national intelligence director with authority over intelligence operations at both the Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Department -- Kerry and Bush have already disagreed.

Several earlier panels, including a presidential advisory board commissioned by Bush and headed by former national security advisor Brent Scowcroft, have formally proposed such a position.

Kerry has endorsed the idea; Bush aides have said they are skeptical of the plan, and the White House has never acted on it.

Part of the problem -- and a possible restraint on the president -- is the attitude of the bureaucracies that work for him now: The CIA and the Defense Department strongly oppose giving up their autonomy to work for an intelligence czar in the White House.

To add to Bush’s discomfort, one leading senator from each party, John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.), said they would draft legislation to enact all the commission’s major recommendations, and Kerry endorsed the effort.

McCain is a longtime Republican rival of Bush’s who ran against him for the 2000 presidential nomination; McCain and Lieberman wrote the law that established the commission despite initial resistance from the White House.

“There have been a few commissions in the last hundred years that have had a significant impact on national policy,” McCain said. “This is one of them.... The 9/11 commission is coming to a neighborhood near you.”

On several issues -- including forming a department of homeland security and establishing the 9/11 commission -- the administration has initially resisted reform ideas coming from Congress, only to adopt them later. And Rice indicated that Bush’s position could shift again.

“The president has already been very clear that he’s looking to make further intelligence reforms,” she said at a hastily called briefing for reporters. “I don’t think anybody believes that the answer is the status quo.”

Kean, Hamilton and other commission members said they planned to take advantage of the dynamic of a closely contested election to press both parties to act on their recommendations.

“All 10 of us have decided to ... do everything we can, whether it’s testimony or lobbying or speaking or whatever’s necessary, to let the American people know about these recommendations -- know how important they are, our belief that they can save lives,” Kean said. He said the panel would continue to work as a group long after its charter went out of existence.

Commission member Jamie S. Gorelick, a former Justice Department official in the Clinton administration, said the election would help the panel make its point “because everyone who is running for office can be asked: Do you support these recommendations?”

Commission member Timothy J. Roemer, a former Democratic congressman from Indiana, said: “We will do a report card in six to 12 months to assess what Congress or the White House has done or not done. We will work with the 9/11 families ... [and] with the American people as agents of change. I think they will compel the elected officials and policymakers in this country to make the significant changes to make this a country that is safer and more secure -- in a bipartisan manner.”

Commission aides said the members planned to travel the country in pairs -- one Democrat, one Republican -- to speak and lobby for their recommendations. Former Watergate prosecutor Richard Ben-Veniste, a Democrat, and former Sen. Slade Gorton (R-Wash.) are likely to head for the West Coast. Gorelick, a Democrat, and former Navy Secretary John F. Lehman, a Republican, may be another pair.

The fate they hope to escape, commission members said, is that of an earlier commission on terrorism headed by former Sens. Gary Hart (D-Colo.) and Warren Rudman (R-N.H.).

The Hart-Rudman commission delivered its final report in January 2001, warning that a major terrorist attack on the United States was inevitable and calling for the creation of a homeland security agency. But it was largely ignored until its predictions came true on Sept. 11, 2001.

“Nothing felt worse than finding out we were right,” Hart said Thursday. “When I saw the second plane hit the World Trade Center, I wished we had done more to get public attention.”

Hart said he and Rudman advised the Sept. 11 commission to seize every chance to press its recommendations.

“They’ve decided to storm the airwaves,” Hart said approvingly. “But the airwaves are more receptive post-9/11 than they were pre-9/11.”