9/11 Commission Report & Patriot Act
Show Why This Election Is All Important

By Bill Finucane

President George W. Bush has rushed a couple of pieces of the 9/11 report to fruition, asking Congress for legislation making a new intelligence department and establishing a chief intelligence officer its head.

Mr. Bush appears to be counting on the American people to see the move itself, figure he has done the really important work and forget all other details. There is some reason for such an assumption, since often that has been the way America has reacted to big political, security and intelligence issues: give them a plan, put it in place, everything will turn out ducky.

Just trust the people at the top to worry about details.

They have the know-how, after all.

Right?

No.

America is in the throes of intelligence meltdown so serious as to require vast, deep, immediate surgery. Famously, we relied on decades-old Iraqi intelligence that simply presumed everything was the same during all the intervening years.

Even in the last few weeks there was an amazing example of intelligence ineptitude when the ‘air space cadets’ in the various branches of government monitoring air travel over Washington, D.C., were so ill prepared and communicated to each other so poorly that they very nearly shot down a small plane bringing a Republican governor to the capital for services honoring Ronald Reagan.

Top to bottom, side to side, any way you want to present it, America’s intelligence system seems to be working – actually – against the country.

Osama bin Laden uses the Internet to fuel Muslim zeal, building hatred out of the terrible poverty among Middle East countries in order to patch together the al Qaeda operations. And of course, more than anything else, this group plans and desires to carry out terrorist attacks on the soil of America and other western nations.

Al Qaeda qualifies as an intelligence agency. It gets its information from human beings who have infiltrated this country, particularly, and others as well, sometimes as students, sometimes as tourists, sometimes as businesspeople, and sometimes as immigrants. They have learned the language and the culture, but their hearts are hardened through Madras schools and so-called religious teachings that began to narrow their viewpoints and feed hatred and envy from the time they were children. The Arab zealots and cynical ‘religious’ leaders have far outdistanced Hitler’s attempt to brainwash generations of Germans through the Hitler Youth brigades.

What America needs is a similar intelligence work; not one comprised of hate-filled zealots, but one made up of smart human beings dedicated to freedom rather than to totalitarianism. It needs real people with real knowledge of foreign languages, people who can embed themselves in turbulent nations and pass along living, breathing information.

This sounds so simple, but it is the one thing that was missing in our intelligence that did the most to get us unnecessarily into war with Iraq. We relied on technology.

Looking at the technological evidence, and combining it with a certain predilection toward removing Saddam Hussein, we felt war was the only option, so we went to war.

Did Bush and company push their viewpoint into the intelligence survey’s relating to an Iraq war scenario? Absolutely.

But with no real ‘on the ground’ intelligence, the nation was blind.

The catalyst that of course led first to Afghanistan and then to Iraq was of course the horror that resulted from the hijacking of four jumbo jets that Arabs, principally Saudi Arabians, flew into the twin buildings of the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and into a rural Pennsylvania field as desperate and brave American passengers thwarted the plans of the hijackers in the last plane.

Some officials in Washington, urged on by the families of the 9/11 victims, sought to establish a committee to study how American intelligence did not foresee the Sept. 11, 2001, massacre of 3,000 Americans. Remarkably, President Bush said no, there would be no investigation. Eventually, in the face of increasing questions, he relented.

He would let the commission go ahead and study the matter and file its report.

But that never, at any point, equaled a signal that Bush would do what the group asked or suggested in its report.

In what is now a familiar pattern, the Bush Administration is currently voicing support for the 9/11 commission and its report, but is taking a piece from this part of the report and a slice from that part of the report, then naming the pieces as the report did so it will naturally seem like what the executive branch is doing is exactly the same thing as the commission suggested. In this manner Mr. Bush apparently hopes to walk off the field with precisely what he wants.

What does he want?

Executive power over the intelligence community, that is his objective.

Under Bush’s version, the new intelligence czar would be appointed by Bush. Yes there would be congressional review of the appointment, but Bush would have all the power in the process of naming who gets selected. The new intelligence officer would probably not be at cabinet level, but whether he or she was matters little, as does however loudly he or she is praised; the position will that of Bush’s messenger, nothing more.

Budgets and money, the coin of the realm and the final indication of power?

Please, that will stay under the defense people.

Hiring and firing intelligence officers in the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Central Intelligence Agency, and all the military intelligence services, will that be part of the new super intelligence job? Not a chance.

Essentially, the new intelligence super gal or guy will have no power, other than talking with the president. If the new intelligence head could speak to the president in a way that combines fairly the viewpoints of all the various intelligence services – which might be the one useful aspect – but that seems like a Herculean task, especially if the new position does not hold tremendous power and authority. In all likelihood the new person will be just another talking head with no influence over anything.

Which appears to be exactly what Bush wants.

All 41 of the 9/11 Commission recommendations can be dealt with separately.

Power – money and personnel – stays with the president.

This is obviously unsettling since Mr. Bush pays so little attention to the Constitution. When they contradict him, he brushes off the views of the Senate and House of Representatives like cat hair, and has shown a desire to manipulate the judiciary and appoint new judges who seem willing to abide by a strict set of rules having to do with Bush’s ideas, not the Constitution or its guarantees.

When they get to the business of 9/11 reforms – this overture from Bush and others – the members of Congress will be conducting a political war as much as making new law. They will have to decide whether to keep, amend or otherwise deal with the so-called Patriot Act, another disturbing outgrowth of the Twin Towers tragedy.

The Patriot Act provides a series of structural changes in the processes of law that make no sense to a layman reading them. You need to know security law by chapter and verse to make any sense of it, and because it is so arcane it is subject to abuse.

There are some excellent elements in it, which should remain, but there are far too many twists and turns in the document that serve to limit if not eliminate long-standing freedoms and liberties, while simultaneously expanding the power and authority of the government. And this from a Republican Administration and Congress! The party that always claims an allegiance to the concept that smaller government is best.

Congress passed the Patriot Act in the midst of an emergency. There was no time to read it. That is the case with most bills, of course, but interestingly this huge and complex addition to the law structure was presented to Congress by Attorney General John Ashcroft only weeks after 9/11. Perhaps his staff worked 24 hours a day to develop it, or perhaps much of it was already in draft form; so far this has not been made clear.

Well, now the Congress will have time to read it and to think about it and discuss it. This is where Congress can pull back on a power hungry executive branch that sees the other branches of government as mere window dressing.

And in that light, imagine the nation after the coming election.

If Bush wins – and he will play all the nation’s heartstrings and paint all the terror scenarios needed to do so – America could become something that the Founding Fathers never imagined, a wasteland of broken Constitutional protections and ripped up liberties.

The 9/11 recommendations will be reduced to nothing of any true power; the Patriot Act will be renewed without significant change and the president will still have power to declare war on any target nation he likes, because Congress allowed that to slip into law when Congress was terror stricken.

Moreover, the changes would become permanent.

No Congress ever before allowed such a transference of power – granting unquestioned executive war authority – and in a second term, such power would likely become a permanent part of presidential authority.

So the Congress has plenty of cleaning up to do if it wants to restore anything at all like a balance of power between the executive, legislative and judiciary branches. But the impetus to do so will hinge upon the coming election.

It will become the time Americans stand up and fight Bush and his right-wing zealots for their traditional rights, or the time Americans lost their backbone in the face of Muslim zealots and left themselves to in the hands of Mr. Bush and the authoritarian devices he and his administration are so fond of implementing.

If Americans get fooled by Bush and put him in power, this time with electoral legitimacy, they may never get the chance to recover from that folly. Rome’s unbeatable army lived to rule its world for 1,000 years. America may reach its fall in just a couple of decades, unless it moves away from the course that Mr. Bush has set for it.