LYNNWOOD – The United States is safer from terrorists today, but not safe enough, former U.S. Sen. Slade Gorton said Tuesday.
“We’ve done quite well since 9-11 in preventing terrorist attacks against the U.S. and disrupting terrorist attacks overseas,” said Gorton, a Washington Republican who served on the independent panel that investigated the 2001 terror attacks. “But we’ve fallen short in protecting our land, our liberties and our people.”
Gorton spoke Tuesday at a meeting of the South Snohomish County Chamber of Commerce, where he discussed his experience as part of the 9-11 commission.
The commission found widespread failures of government agencies in the months leading up to the attack, he said. “All of us, but primarily our federal instruments, failed.”
The problem was “a failure of imagination,” Gorton said. “No one inside our government imagined an attack of that intensity, so no one prepared for it.”
For example, the State Department was tracking potential terrorists but never alerted the Federal Aviation Administration so it could keep those suspects off airplanes, he said. The FBI “viewed terrorism as a law-enforcement problem” and was geared to arrest and prosecute terrorists after the fact, not stop them in the first place.
The commission was appointed in a highly charged, partisan atmosphere, he said, after families of the victims of the attacks successfully lobbied for an independent investigation over the objections of President Bush, who was “quite reluctant.”
But the members of the commission were able to come together in a bipartisan way and ended up being unanimous “to the footnote” in their findings and recommendations, Gorton said.
Their key finding was that it’s not possible to come to terms with al-Qaida. Osama bin Laden comes from a minority faction within Islam that feels the West represents “the worst civilization in the history of mankind,” Gorton said. “It is impossible to bargain or negotiate with that ideology. It can only be eliminated or isolated.”
The commission recommended a three-part response: attack the terrorists in their sanctuaries; wage a “war of ideas” that isolates the al-Qaida minority from mainstream Islam; and increase America’s defenses against future attacks.
To accomplish that, the commission proposed steps to unify the 15 government agencies that collect intelligence.
The U.S. Senate quickly moved to put the recommendations into law, Gorton said, but the proposals have been bogged down in the House of Representatives, in large part because the U.S. military doesn’t want to give up control over its own intelligence gathering.
“The most powerful lobby in Washington, D.C., is the status quo,” Gorton said.
The 9-11 commission officially has disbanded, but the members have kept in touch and are working together to get their recommendations put into law, he said.
Reporter Bryan Corliss: 425-339-3454 or corliss@heraldnet.com.
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