The 9/11 commission plans to hit the road

The 9/11 commission plans to hit the road
Tuesday, September 21, 2004

On Aug. 21, 30 days after the 9/11 panel issued its final report, the commission was, by law, dissolved.

But the commissioners' work was not finished.

The 9/11 panel didn't compile and issue its 567-page report to see it gathering dust on a shelf somewhere.

So the 10 panel members - five Republicans and five Democrats as unified as ever - have formed a private group that hopes to generate a national debate about how best to protect the nation from terrorist attack. The members of the 9/11 commission will be the board of directors of the newly formed 9/11 Public Discourse Project.

They've got a Washington office and a tiny staff of five paid employees, but there is every reason to believe that the new group will have a big impact across the entire nation. The directors plan to hit the road in groups of two beginning this month.

From its inception, the 9/11 commission - formally the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States - has been a singularly bipartisan group working in a remarkably divided city.

It's chairman, Thomas H. Kean, former Republican governor of New Jersey, and its vice chairman, Lee H. Hamilton, a former Democratic congressman from Indiana, led a panel that did its work in the open and spoke with one voice. Its final report was the view of all 10 members, issued without dissent.

Kean and Hamilton and the eight others won well deserved praise for their efforts over 20 months. They should be lauded for their decision to continue their work.

The new group announced on Friday that it had gathered nearly $1 million in private pledges, and that it would make public the names of the donors once the promises were formalized. The 9/11 Public Discourse Project plans to be in operation for about one year.

There's been an awful lot of talk inside the Washington Beltway about how best to protect the nation from another catastrophic attack. The new group intends to see that a similar discussion takes place across the whole nation.

It's hard to find fault with that.

The conversation, after all, is about protecting the citizenry. What makes the most sense is seeing that the citizenry take part in that discussion.
http://www.masslive.com/editorials/republican/index.ssf?/base/news-1/109575315176310.xml

For the a rational analysis of the Omission Report, see -

ANALYZING THE 9/11 REPORT: Chapter 1: Omissions, Contradictions and Falsehoods
Thursday, August 26, 2004
Current News about 9-11by Michael Kane
Editorial & Research Contribution from Bryan Sacks

The 9/11 Report turns more and more into an "omission report".
9/11 Truth Activist and researcher Mike Kane broke it apart...

The final report released by the 9/11 Commission contradicts itself in the very first chapter, repeatedly, and strains credulity beyond a reasonable limit in a number of places. Our primary focus will be chapter 1 of the report titled, 'We Have Some Planes,' in which the notification and response of the FAA and NORAD is discussed... In chapter 1, there is a discussion of NORAD's mission to defend the airspace of North America. The report states that in the immediate post-Cold War era:

NORAD perceived the dominant threat to be from cruise missiles. Other threats were identified during the late 1990s, including terrorists' use of aircraft as weapons. Exercises were conducted to counter this threat, but they were not based on actual intelligence. In most instances, the main concern was the use of such aircraft to deliver weapons of mass destruction. [p. 17, emphasis added]

This statement shows the threat of planes being used as weapons was known to NORAD for a long time. But later in the same chapter, the report states:

The defense of U.S. airspace on 9/11 was not conducted in accord with preexisting training and protocols. It was improvised by civilians who had never handled a hijacked aircraft that attempted to disappear, and by a military unprepared for the transformation of commercial aircraft into weapons of mass destruction. [p. 31, emphasis added]

This must be what Chairman Kean has called the ' failure of imagination.' So we are asked to accept that while NORAD was well aware of the possibility of hijacked aircraft being used as weapons, it somehow couldn't imagine commercial aircraft being hijacked and used as weapons?

(continued)