Commission warned Bush

[David Morris]

http://www.salon.com/politics/feature/2001/09/12/bush/index.html

Commission warned Bush

They went to great pains not to sound as though they were telling the 
president "We told you so."

But on Wednesday, two former senators, the bipartisan co-chairs of a Defense 
Department-chartered commission on national security, spoke with something 
between frustration and regret about how White House officials failed to 
embrace any of the recommendations to prevent acts of domestic terrorism 
delivered earlier this year.

Bush administration officials told former Sens. Gary Hart, D-Colo., and 
Warren Rudman, R-N.H., that they preferred instead to put aside the 
recommendations issued in the January report by the U.S. Commission on 
National Security/21st Century. Instead, the White House announced in May 
that it would have Vice President Dick Cheney study the potential problem of 
domestic terrorism -- which the bipartisan group had already spent two and a 
half years studying -- while assigning responsibility for dealing with the 
issue to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, headed by former Bush 
campaign manager Joe Allbaugh.

The Hart-Rudman Commission had specifically recommended that the issue of 
terrorism was such a threat it needed far more than FEMA's attention.

Before the White House decided to go in its own direction, Congress seemed 
to be taking the commission's suggestions seriously, according to Hart and 
Rudman. "Frankly, the White House shut it down," Hart says. "The president 
said 'Please wait, we're going to turn this over to the vice president. We 
believe FEMA is competent to coordinate this effort.' And so Congress moved 
on to other things, like tax cuts and the issue of the day."



_________________________________________________________________
Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp