WASHINGTON - The government is still failing to enact many swift and strong security changes to prevent terror attacks, the former Sept. 11 Commission has concluded.
More than four years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the government has not done enough to stop nuclear proliferation, give emergency first responders adequate communications systems and ensure that homeland security grants are going to the most high-risk communities, former commissioners said Friday.
"We're taking small steps when we need a giant leap," said former Democratic commissioner Timothy Roemer, who is now president of the Center for National Policy at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va. "We're watching al-Qaida change and spread out like mercury on a mirror while our bureaucracies are still sometimes stuck in Cold War mentality and cultures."
Congress established the 10-member, bipartisan commission in 2002 to investigate government missteps that led to the 9/11 attacks. It issued its findings — that the United States could not protect its citizens from the attacks because it underestimated al-Qaida — in a sweeping July 2004 report.
But since then, any sense of urgency by Congress and the Bush administration to safeguard key national vulnerabilities has dissolved or gotten tangled up in turf wars, the former commissioners said.
The group — now operating as the 9/11 Public Discourse Project — began a series of hearings in June to examine what it described as the government's unfinished agenda in the campaign to secure the country. It will issue a report Monday grading the government's overall response to its recommendations as well as assessing Washington's performance on each of a dozen potential problem areas.
You can thank the Bush administration for keeping our "homeland" secure.
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