Reply #3: This Has Failed To Meet Even My Low Expectations..My Letter To Commission [View All]

[GR]

Dear Mr. Ben-Veniste:

I cannot tell you how embarrassed I was for you and for America as I listened to yesterday's press conference. Imagine if you will a bank robbery of millions of dollars. Then posit that before the robbery, the bank President was told that criminals were determined to rob the bank, investigators identified notorious bank robbers in the area, the bank doors were left unlocked and the vault door was left ajar. Then imagine the police, charged with investigating the robbery saying, "It was a failure of imagination and we don't want to get into the partisan blame game as to who was at fault for the robbery."

That, in my opinion, is a very accurate analogy for what you and your rancor-averse committee have done.

May I further say that bad premises, in this case the premises that include "this was beyond anyone's imagination, no one was should suffer employment consequences for their failures and we must at all costs avoid the blame game," leads to bad conclusions, in this case that "simply rearranging the boxes on the organization chart will solve the problem of the pervasive individual and group malfeasance that accompanied 9-11."

I believe that it was the President's job to draw these threads together, along with the National Security Council and Condoleeza Rice, not another layer of bureaucracy. Richard Clarke documented just how unresponsive the Bush administration was to the terror threat. We certainly don't need another level on the org chart to solve the problems and as a matter of fact, another layer of bureaucracy wouldn't make a President pay attention to dire warnings or look beyond a well-documented obsession with Iraq (See O'Neill and Clarke) or make the FBI pay attention to memos written by a brave field agent or make the DCI tell the President that someone was learning to fly in order to crash a plane into a building.

In addition, the 9-11 families developed a very detailed list of questions that the wanted answers to and you failed to answer most of them. How unconscionable.

When I learned of your appointment to the Commission, I had great hopes that you would be a force for honesty and truth seeking. Instead, I feel that you let "The Republican Noise Machine" as David Brock so aptly calls it, intimidate you. Of all people who I thought would hold the Commission Report to a standard of truth and honesty, you were the biggest disappointment. Although your tough questioning in the public hearings was exemplary, by signing on to this report, you have brought great shame to your name and the reputation of the Commission and done nothing substantive to make America safe from new attacks. For that you will be remembered but not forgiven.