"Reason's take on the coming 9/11 hearings. I agree.
1. Insulate for Protection
It looks like that great Washington tradition of the "independent commission," convened to find out why things went very, very wrong, finally will be applied to the matter of 9/11.
Like virtually all it predecessors--Supreme Court Justice Owen Roberts, long-winded look at Pearl Harbor, which settled essentially nothing; the Warren Commission, which either hid JFK's brain or didn't have one of its own, depending on whom you ask; and the recent terrorism commissions, Aspin-Brown (1996) and Hart-Rudman (2000)--this commission will serve primarily as another layer of bureaucratic cover between decision makers and the effects of their decisions.
Such commissions do not so much cover up as insulate. They remove potentially contentious issues from the hurly burly of public, partisan politics to the cozy confines of well-known faces and old hands who all agree to take a little hit in exchange for ducking the haymaker heading their way.
In this case the big punch is the plausible charge that 9/11 could have been prevented if the feds had worried about their fellow citizens as much as they did about turf, procedure, and looking good in the eyes of fellow agents. The families of the victims are just now beginning to grasp the meaning of the past year?s news stories, which were punctuated by congressional hearings last week.
At a minimum, the CIA dithered in asking other federal agencies to be on the lookout for the terrorists who would later take part in the attacks. The prospect of a truly independent investigation into such things would have top CIA officials resigning in droves just to get it all over with. That no such thing has happened speaks to the power of an old Washington tradition. |
