Shameful 9/11 report card demands concerted action

At worst, the report card issued this week by members of the 9/11 commission, liberally littered with poor and failing grades on America's preparedness to prevent attacks, represents a shameful and scathing indictment of our leaders' commitment to winning the war on terror on the homefront.
At best, the report card serves as a detailed road map for action and improvement.
We owe it to the painstaking work of the bipartisan independent commission that identified weaknesses and evaluated our response to those weaknesses to commit the nation to use all available resources to do better. We must do better.
The panel provides many clear and well-reasoned suggestions to ensure the United States stands better prepared to prevent any semblance of the atrocities of Sept. 11, 2001, from recurring on our soil in coming weeks, months and years.
Clearly, much work must be done.
'Scandalous' findings
Republican Thomas H. Kean, former New Jersey governor and chairman of the commission, and Democrat Lee H. Hamilton, vice chairman of the commission, were not mincing words when they decried that "our government is still moving at a crawl" and that some of the documented failures are "shocking" and "scandalous."
To quote those leaders of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States from the summary of their report card:
U"It is scandalous that police and firefighters in large cities still cannot communicate reliably in a major crisis." One need look back no farther than the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to validate this finding. First responders were unable to establish lines of communication on the same radio frequency.
U"It is scandalous that airline passengers are still not screened against all names on the terrorist watchlist." Compilation of a terrorist watch list for airline screening has become one of many victims of bureaucratic lethargy.
U"It is scandalous that we still allocate scarce homeland security dollars on the basis of pork barrel spending, not risk." The result of such politicization has been that states unlikely to be targets of terror, such as Wyoming and South Dakota, are siphoning dollars away from states in the bull's-eye of Al-Qaida, such as New York and California.
Some positive marks
To be fair, not all is gloom and doom. The panel did hand out a few exemplary marks. One of the principal recommendations of the panel in its 41 recommendations issued last year -- creating a director of national intelligence -- was readily adopted, and the post is now held by John Negroponte who has received relatively positive reviews. The federal government also received an excellent grade in better monitoring funding for terrorist groups that target the West.
But the dozen Ds and Fs, which represent nearly one-third of all grades, stand out. According to the report card, our government also has performed poorly or has failed miserably in these errors: cargo screening, incentives and guidelines for sharing information among layers of government, and preventing terrorists from acquiring weapons of mass destruction.
Such findings elicit frustration, worry and fear.
They ought also inspire action by our leaders throughout the legislative and executive branches of our federal government.
To their credit, the 10 members of the 9/11 commission stayed together long past issuance of their final recommendations last year. Now that their evaluation is in and the body is disbanded, there will be no additional report card from them. It will be up to all Americans to evaluate weaknesses, monitor follow-through and demand action. If we do not, we will have only ourselves to blame when and if our lack of preparedness ushers in an attack of 9/11 proportions or greater on our mainland.