Focus 580; The Report of the 9-11 Commission

Well in this part of focus 580 we'll be talking about the commission investigating the terrorist attacks of 9 11 and recently presented its final report. It's still being discussed and no doubt will be discussed for some time. In this part of focus 580 will be talking with Steven Strasser. He teaches journalism at Rutgers University and also for a number of years worked for Newsweek magazine. He was a foreign correspondent national affairs editor and also managing editor of the international editions of Newsweek and he is the editor of a book that's recently been published. That brings together the staff reports of the 9/11 Commission. They're available also of course on the Commission's website and if you heard some of the live coverage that we had here on I AM 580 of some of the commission hearings you heard members of the staff reading these reports or at least exits from them. If you would like to read them in detail you can look for this book it's entitled The 9 11 investigations which also includes some exits from the House Senate joint inquiry report on 9/11 and then testimony from a number of key witnesses

including Richard Clarke George Tenet and Conda Lisa Rice it's published by Public Affairs. And it is available in paperback so it's not terribly expensive and you should be able to find it in the books. Right now. But of course questions are welcome here on the same subject here on the program here in Champagne Urbana. If you'd like to call the number 3 3 3 9 4 5 5 we do also have a toll free line. That's good any way that you can hear us around Illinois or Indiana in fact if you happen to be listening on the Internet you can use the number. Just long as you're in the United States and that's eight hundred to 2 2 9 4 5 5 3 3 3 WRAL toll free 800 2 2 2 w Island Mr. Stross or hello hello how are you. I'm fine thanks and thanks very much for talking with us. My pleasure. And we certainly appreciate it. Just so that people can understand what it is we're talking about here the if people watched some of the hearings or listened we broadcast them I'm sure a lot of other public stations did

broadcast at least parts of them. Now the public face of the commission or the commissioners time Kane and Lee Hamilton and the others including one of our former governors Jim Thompson. Those are the people that got the most attention they went around and did interviews and talk to people on the talk shows and so forth. But what we're talking about here is the. The work of people that were not not so high profile as the commission and yet I think pretty important to the to the work of the to the commission. Maybe you can talk about a little bit about how the staff reports were generated and who were what kind of people were responsible for doing this research. Well fortunately for us there were a lot of writerly people involved. They included the kinds of researchers you see on congressional staff there were lawyers and investigators in some cases people with former police backgrounds who were added to the staff for investigations

they received a lot of cooperation especially as time went on from the administration itself ministration with the con people from the agencies or the State Department and Pentagon to help put together material for these reports. And at the top of them was with a group of people with publishing experience and I might say that one of the features of these these reports can appear that any other government report you might have read in your life is that they're stream the well written. That's it. That's at the root of our decision to put this book together. Well if you if you look at this material and also at the the final report that the commission released it seems that you know different people have different sorts of reactions to it some people think that it was it was well done. Other people think that it doesn't go far enough particularly in its

criticism of the Bush administration the Clinton administration the FBI the CIA and so forth and certainly there there is criticism there for all of them. Is it I don't know do you feel like making some kind of a judgment about how just how significant and how far reaching the final result is. My judgment is about the nature of the report itself. I think they did a wonderful job. I think that Governor Kaine Representative Hamilton reflects an earlier era when politicians of either Republican or Democratic Party could find consensus especially. On a matter of national security or national crisis in this case. And I think they brought together this Commission which did include you know equally an equal number of Republicans and Democrats and came up with a consensus report which I think was quite hard hitting. So yes there are compromises

perhaps some people think they didn't hit the Bush administration hard enough and think could be said about the Clinton administration. But I think they did come up with a markedly good consensus and get a better report than has been produced by these kinds of commissions in the past. The Chair and the co-chair Tom Kane and Lee Hamilton were not the first choice for that job. There were a couple of other more much more high profile names that were put out there who then subsequently decided that they they couldn't or wouldn't be involved. How did they end up with Governor Kaine and Congressman Hamilton as being the number one and number two guys on this commission. Well they did go through some some some other names. I think the the main problem was in the name the main name that gave them problems was Henry Kissinger's. When you think of Henry Kissinger the vision springing up

in a dinner party or at a reception or in the nation there are people who think he was a brilliant strategist. And there are people who think that he was an evil manipulator behind the scenes to who brought down innocent governments around the world and caused untold human anguish. So everybody has an opinion either love or merely hate him. And I think they didn't want I think after the the storm broke over Kissinger that they just decided they didn't want to go that way. They didn't want to have a personality who was three nouns for causing divisiveness at the head of this commission no matter how talented he would have been in actually putting a report together and organizing the commission's work. So they turned to Cain who was a consensus man a very moderate Republican who had gotten along equally with Republican Democrats in New Jersey which is basically a Democratic state. What would you say were the so obviously we're talking about the commission having generated an awful lot of

information and the staff reports for example looked at all all phases of the terrorist attack of 9/11 how it is the hijackers got here why it is that they their presence here wasn't identified or if somebody got the idea that there was some reason to be suspicious somehow it never went beyond that person and their agency there was bad coordination between the various agencies who were concerned with security issues and it looks at the the attack and how it happened and it looked at the response and a very wide range of information but as you know you had the opportunity to look at all of this. What what would you say and then perhaps we can go back and we can talk in some detail. Were the the most important findings of the commission. Well there were of course the newsworthy finding they proposed the director of national intelligence. They proposed that the budget for the disparate intelligence agencies be brought under his control and they proposed an

umbrella counterterrorist center that would try to bring the information flow from all the intelligence agencies under under control. That was the basic underlying message of the policy recommendations of the commission. They of course also made strong points as commentators like Fareed Zakaria have noted about the need for the United States to take a more comprehensive approach in its relations with the Middle East to solve our problem. Just getting along with that part of the world and understanding it and helping it join the world that that we belong to so that we it doesn't become a hotbed of terrorism. That doesn't remain a hotbed of terrorism. Well it seems that one of the key points that certainly caused a lot of conversation was the issue of was what was there in the way of state support for the hijackers. The one of the big questions that there has been hotly debated for

example was was the government of Iraq at all involved. Also more recently there have been questions raised about whether there was any funding for the hijackers from Saudi sources and they were most of them were Saudis and then more recently there was this question about Iran and the fact that that apparently some of the hijackers may have passed through Iran and that the Iranian government had at least been made it easy for him booted them to do that. I don't think anybody has drawn a line drawn a line between that and September 11th. But there are all these questions raised about why did these governments or were there any governments involved. And it does it seem that the the bottom line question the bottom line answer to all those questions as least as far as the commission is concerned is no. None of those governments did indeed were specifically involved in the 9/11 plot. I would say that's correct maybe not a strict no but apparently not.

For example the commission did note that various members of the terrorist teams had passed through Iran. But it made no judgement about whether the Iranians were facilitating this because they were part of the plot or whether they were just facilities to facilitating this. Because they show if they agreed with the politics of the of the operatives. So it's it they didn't find any Iranian support they didn't find any Saudi state support. They concluded that Iraq did not support the terrorists there had been meetings about cooperation but nothing ever developed. There also the United Arab Emirates is a big player in this a lot of the financing flow through United Arab Arab Emirates. So there are certainly a lot of national connections but there's no solid evidence that the Commission has received any governments were involved. The Bush administration has been criticized for trying

to. Well here's the way I think people lay it out. They would say the Bush administration never did say directly in so many words that Saddam Hussein was somehow involved in the plot of 9/11. But. And a lot of the public pronouncements about the war on terror are the those things are always mentioned together. Not this not not directly connected but the criticism of the of the administration has been is that what they're trying to do is get people in their minds to make that association without the administration coming right out and and saying it. The commission 9 11 11 Commission I think came out and made a very strong statement saying that they didn't believe that there was any any connection between al Qaeda and the and the government of Saddam Hussein it seemed though that after that some people in the administration were still saying well maybe or that there is some evidence or that you can't rule it out there. They're still wanting to make that suggestion that well there

might be some Or that we know about it but we can't exactly tell you what. What do you think about that. The that that assertion that the commission made a pretty strong assertion saying No there just is no evidence of of an active relationship going on between the government of Iraq under Saddam Hussein and. Well I trust what the commission says. They're independent. They did extremely good work. Nothing they've said has really been questioned by the administration so far. And I think that they thoroughly obviously very thoroughly investigated the idea of connections between Saddam and al Qaeda and came up with that conclusion. Same on the weapons I mean David Kay was appointed as the weapons inspector by the Bush administration. He thoroughly review every nook and cranny of the country after after the U.S. invasion with U.S. support while the U.S. controlled everything

on the ground. And he says any idea that Iraq was sheltering weapons of mass destruction is is a dream. So I tend to I tend to give a lot of credence to both those both those authorities. The the specific charge to the commission was to investigate the attack of 9/11 not to get into the whole issue of was the was it right to go to war in Iraq. However that was the that was a subject that continue to come up and you just couldn't get away from because in that there were there were certainly connections and. And yet I think the commission continue to say no look this was making saying anything about Iraq this was not what we were supposed to do. Having said that what do you I wonder if you have any sort of feeling that there was some inclination on the commission to actually get into that more than they did. Or were they just perfectly happy not to be able to say this is

not our agenda because that just would have made things that much more complicated. I think their goal was to look very critically at all aspects of 9/11 as you say and by critically I mean critically as they came into New York where a lot of firemen and police officers that died and they made a point of being played respectful but very critical of the way New York handled the. Crisis day itself including the communications between the police and fire departments. So I think this commission was determined to keep focused on 9/11 to keep focus on its mission to find out what went wrong. They weren't that they weren't there to put a gloss on things they were there to find out what went wrong. And I think they were happy not to drag in Iraq in issues that were preferable to them. There was a there was an amusing moment when the Richard Clarke showed up for his second or third round of testimony at the commission after he had made all

he his his his charges about the bush improperly going to war in Iraq and some of the civil Why didn't you bring this up before. And he said well you didn't ask me. We have a caller we welcome other folks if you'd like to get in the conversation let me again introduce our guest Steven Strauss or he said now teaches journalism at Rutgers University. He's a former foreign correspondent and editor at Newsweek and he is the editor of a book titled The 9/11 investigations which brings together the staff reports from the 9/11 Commission. Also some of the House Senate joint inquiry report parts of that and also some testimony from some of the most important witnesses who appeared before the 9/11 Commission. It's published by Public Affairs is in paper. It is in the bookstore now. If you'd like to look at questions here are welcome 3 3 3 9 4 5 5. We also have a toll free line that was good anywhere that you can hear us and that he's eight hundred to 2 2 9 4 5 5. We do have a caller on our toll free line in Aurora.

We'll go there. Line number four. Hello. I'd like to go back to 1993. That was the first time that the World Trade buildings were attacked. Wasn't it. 1993 yes. What was done then. And in any way to possibly. Not have what happened at 9/11. Was there anything anything put and to a fact then. So 9/11 wouldn't happen. Well that was a sensational and violent attack that killed I believe fewer than 10 people and injured hundreds and of course caused a royal mess and downtown New York. But you know security measures were put in after that

largely in the form of increased security personnel a better alarm system and procedures for evacuating and handling a crisis in the World Trade Center that hadn't existed before. But I have to say and I think. I think perhaps a lot of New Yorkers would agree with me that that at at at its base that attack was considered something of a joke. These guys drove a van full of explosives into the World Trade Center and thought they were going to tip it over to the neighboring tower and bring them both down and every architecture and engineer in the city got up and said that was ridiculous and impossible and basically it was a futile attack so the attack itself as a manifestation of what to expect from terrorists was not taken as seriously as the childe have been the guy they arrested for that attack Ramzi Yousef at one point. In fact he was flying into New York for a

court appearance and the FBI agent accompanying him pointed at the World Trade Center and said it's still standing and Ramzi Yousef said. We'll be back. And they did on the guy. They did come back and we didn't take it seriously. Well that's isn't that is that one element that I saw watching it I was watching TV. And when it happened at 8:45 my time and I the people there didn't seem to be an alarm system in effect while I was there. Yes that woman didn't know how it seemed to me to be going out of the building. Oh there were 10000 people in the World Trade Center that morning. It's the of the alarm system works perfectly after the. After that they had no capabilities to fight a fire above the floors wall or the plane struck.

But the people below that in in the north tower which was struck first evacuated very quickly and efficiently. Oh ok if it wasn't it wasn't that big of a problem. The one of the problems is that in order to try to save people from falling debris security in the South Tower ordered people go back to their offices saying there's no danger here that of course I remember. I remember hearing that and then the second plane hit the South Tower. I guess it wasn't really we were incapable of realizing. What they could be doing. We just I think refuse to believe that that could really be happening to us. That's what Governor Kaine said in his when he announced the commission's final findings that the main problem here was our lack of imagination. We just didn't imagine that something like this could happen. Yes it's a very sad thing. And do you think there is

any way of of well I understand about the what has been worked on too but you just I think that there are terrorists and now is a thing that is I want to say new but not new. But we have to understand how a terrorist's mind is. And that's what we have to imagine what their mind is that what they're capable of thinking. You know they don't care if they die. And I know that if I can make two remarks on that one is to reflect what the commission said about our need to understand that part of the world better and understand their resentments of us better and several witnesses. The commission most eloquently Mellen Albright made that same point. So I mean that's certainly a very strong aspect of it. Thank

you don't thank you just for a moment. I want to go back to you know to the comment that Governor Kaine made about when he was introducing the final report talking about the fact that maybe one of the great failures here was a failure of imagination and certainly Conda Lisa Rice for example has been she said now famously and as a quote I'm sure that has been repeated over and over again said something effective no one could have imagined that terrorists would hijack a commercial airliner and use it as a missile to fly into the building. And in a press conference that President Bush had he essentially echoed that over and over again he stood there in front of the reporters and then the American people and said if we had known that terrorists were going to hijack an airplane and fly it into the World Trade Center we would have done something about it. And I'm sure everybody of course believes that well of course they would. But there but that does raise this question that well is it really is it really the case that no one

imagined that such a thing could happen. And it it would seem that. That in in its inquiries the commission really called that into question because apparently there were people who did imagine such a thing could have happened. Well there have been previous cases. There was a case where Algerian hijackers tried to fly a plane into the Eiffel Tower. I believe in the 1990s there was another case where American intelligence picked up word of a terrorist group in the Middle East trying to fly a plane across the Atlantic to strike an American building which is something that couldn't happen. We are defenses pointing out that he was working quite well. There were reports like that there was the other. Of course the book the plot which involved blowing up planes it was Pacific but people involved in that plot also had an idea of hijacking a plane crashing into the CIA headquarters.

So this idea was out there. It hadn't penetrated to the point where it was made a part of our preparations for terrorist attacks. We have some other callers here to talk with let's go next to someone listening in Indiana this morning. One fellow Well two things. One when Governor King started speaking Karen Zach remembered was when he made that comment. We may be washed out politicians. Then they said something a bit we did or we did our best and did a good job. I never heard anything in the news about who had called them washed out politicians but I presume it was some some Republican brotherly making light of the commission's report and its importance and the caliber of the people who were on it. And secondly when the commission came out so strongly that there were actually no connection between and Iraq then President Bush

said Well there is. And that was sort of left you know the silence in the room. Nobody seemed to be interested in asking him why in a couple days later Putin come out was saying oh yeah we had some our Secret Service said that there were some connections and on me the thing came to mind because I don't trust this administration in any way in any kind of thing and that somehow Putin was put up to this and particularly when he said that. You know you're still against the war you know against what the war was you know it didn't ring right. I wonder if you can make any comments about those two things. Thank you. Well I think Cain was just. Thinking a light hearted comment that reflected the fact that everybody on his commission all the public members were retired politicians or or in State Department or Department of Justice administrators in one case. So they were all retirees who come out to chair this commission.

I don't think there's anything more to it than that. As far as Putin's report I thought of that but it's never really been followed up. And I must say it hasn't been followed out by columnists like Robert Novak who would normally would would reflect shall we say the more untested allegations from inside the Bush administration in Washington. So I'm not sure whether that whether Putin really meant what he said or whether we understood what he meant or whether is a substance to it. I think if there was substance to it then we would have seen a lot more details because the Course supports what Bush is saying about the connection. Well I appreciate that. The caller's comments let's go on here have somebody else in Rantoul line number two in the morning. Yes a couple things. I think one of the things that the whole thing was based on is that it would require an extensive amount of money an extensive amount of time to prepare for the

9 1 1 attacks. Anybody involved in U.S. military black operations would know that within hours you could put this together and get that done. Second thing in looking at the report and reading the report they talk about the preparation Harz and the New York New Jersey port police authority and the emergency service unit back as far as 1995 and I was involved in it. They had received extensive counterterrorism materials and praying very specifically for these type incidents. And so all the warnings are out there. However what happened within the York. The services unit the police and fire they ridicule a lot of Giuliani despite numerous requests or administration and not provided the equipment necessary for an effective response in the event of any situation so I mean that's just kind of stuff that had popped up and happened in there. The real concern that I have and it's been alluded to already numerous times is the fact that nobody want to imagine all this was happening.

But when in the community the counterterrorism discussions and all the stuff was extensively known as far as using jets and aircraft and everything to take out bombers and everything Dale Brown had written up extensively about that in a book called storming heaven. So it was all known. Again the same thing even on the morning that it happened the United Nations have put out messages that they'd put more input in all the warnings out the stuff was about were to happen but it was ignored so I just wonder if the author could kind of comment on those because it seems like looking at the 9 1 1 Commission report and reading through it they just kind of glossed over a lot of a lot of stuff in order to continue on with this myth of al Qaeda who I mean who does exist and has been known to be dangerous and will again the if you're going to New York had known about them plain and far back as 95 form so that the author could comment on some of these big missing gaps on this whole logical sequence. Well Mr. Can you do that. Yes I can. The planning for 9/11 stretches back to the middle of the 1990s at a time when

we thought that bin Laden was essentially a financier of terrorism. He actually heard the first proposals for something that became the 9/11 attacks. So it was really in the works for six years. And it is kind of daunting and depressing to think that our intelligence agency would pick up a plan like this this elaborate with the symphony it's this many parts occurring over this so many geographical areas Europe Asia and the Middle East and not pick it up before it actually happened that is kind of depressing his far as the New York-New Jersey preparations. Those departments and departments all over the place I'm sure in Champaign-Urbana prepared for the millennium in a big way and it's a lot to train for that for dealing with weapons of mass destruction equipment given to local police departments and that sort of thing. So people who are affecting to live in an era where there'd be some kind of terrorism. But we keep getting back this lack of imagination they didn't imagine

the kind of attack that actually occurred when they thought of hijacking in the administration or in the federal administration a Federal Aviation Administration for that matter. They thought the traditional hijacking were a terror of take over a plane park it somewhere and threaten to blow up everybody else unless one of his buddies got out of jail. That's the kind of context they they looked at hijacking. And I guess I disagree with that. OK go to just you when you meant you were mentioning these these I mentioned some of the earlier cases and there have been you mention a book there was a Tom Clancy book to I guess it related to. Crashing into buildings with airplanes. But the administration says is they didn't really have that on their radar screen. Well it just kind of again that's what they're coming up with sand because again the whole justification and everything that the al Qaeda when you look at dig into the actual reports we still don't know who was actually involved. OK. And that's still been up inquiry when we go back the thing in the holding a watch who is involved in terms of

training the terrorists and so I mean trying to train the terrorists and doing the training as far as preparation for an individual fly those aircraft take up your addition to active museum and put you know a bomber and teach you in about 20 minutes how to fly an aircraft sufficiently to do it. It's not that expensive as far as black operations are planned this type of an operation you can do it within two hours three hours easily I'm going to say that it's it's not that complicated. As far as all the warnings and everything the warnings were definitely out there. You mention the equipment supplies being provided. That's a total failure is one thing that's still going on we can't get adequate equipment as a plane flies into the individuals in the primary terrorist threat does not Al Kaida from outside it's 15 to 16 from domestic organizations. So within the stuff so again the hype and hysteria. I think the really thing that really bothers me on this stuff is this whole thing launched obviously launched in the invasion of Afghanistan the invasion of Iraq. OK both I'm totally legal. When we look at the invasion of Afghanistan they need to have a justification.

Has been a lot and again in that group were definitely you know supported by the US military and all their equipment and supplies were provided by General Johnny guess back in 1991 or before. So again it comes down to where you go back to a February 12 the 1098 congressional directive to overthrow the Taliban and get some reason justification to get troops into Afghanistan support the oil the oil pipelines I mean that's cut and dried. I think the thing that disturbs me is how this thing has been twisted around where we have a real viable threats been made into a serious overblown hype and hysteria. Again one group and everything we're It takes so much money and so much time to do this with anybody it's involved in military black operations No you could plan and execute this sucker within two hours. Set easy and train the people to fly the aircraft. C'mon a Purusha new to the museum in 20 minutes will have you fly animal by engine jet sufficient to do it. It's that easy.

Well I got a couple other callers here. Mr. Strauss or any other comment you might want to make on what the caller had to say. Well I think that I guess the one basic comment I would make is that while there were plenty of warnings for before 9/11 there were they didn't have enough specificity to cause actions they were not actionable which is the term I always use as a commission. In other words they would pick up radio conversations saying Our plan is tomorrow the big act is coming. Stuff like that. But none of those things said where or exactly when something was going to happen. So George Tenet the director of the CIA was running around pounding on tables in Washington warning everybody that something was happening but he couldn't say what where or when. And I think you know we were not prepared for it. But. You know we tend to fight yesterday's wars we're very prepared for any attack on aircraft of tomorrow. But

are we prepared for attacks on subways or God knows somewhere else. Well but 10 minutes left maybe it'll be more like 15. And as part of focus 580 Our guest is Steven Strasser he teaches journalism at Rutgers University and was for a number of years on staff at Newsweek. He has been a former foreign correspondent national affairs editor and also a managing editor of the international editions of Newsweek and he's the editor of a book that's just come out that brings together the staff reports of the 9/11 Commission and it's titled The 9/11 investigations. It's published by public affairs and is in bookstore know if you want to look. We had a caller off the air who noted the fact that that well that the president and the vice president agreed to talk with members of the commission. It was behind closed doors. There was no record made of what they said and they weren't required to take an oath. And I believe and you correct me if I'm wrong that also former President Clinton and

Vice President Gore did the same. And the caller was wondering if if there's any particular kind of precedent set by allowing people to appear before a commission like this and yet not requiring them to swear any kind of oath and not having any record of what it is that they said Well I think they were willing to take the national leaders any way they can get them. They were able to talk to people like Condi Rice who was the director of National Security Council and Richard Clarke who had been the anti-terrorism director under both Clinton and George W. Bush in several forms they talked to them privately they talked to them in public for I believe in the case of the national leaders Bush Cheney Clinton Gore. They thought the most efficient use of their time and the most productive use of their time would be old would be to get these guys behind the scenes

to get them. To be as candid as possible you're going to get it by a quantity of canned more information in a private session with them than you are in public session. And as for the oath swearing and all of that I think that's a matter of protocol. It's a matter of not requiring a the chief executive to you know to appear in that kind of a situation when there is no question of illegality or anything like that. Well we have some other folks to talk with. Let's continue with the champagne County and line number one. Hello. Hi it's kind of presumptive that you're saying there's no question of illegality I mean that's that's that's a moot point I think in a lot of people's minds. My understanding and this is in that for sure but the. Clinton

and Gore did give sworn testimony but it hadn't been the practice of the committee to actually swear in many of the earlier witnesses. That was only when the argument turned towards getting some of these high level people and that they started doing that and that the earlier people actually weren't. But going back to correcting the record on another thing a caller called in with the remark about Putin and you didn't catch it. Putin's digression. After the release of the report where they said there was no collaborative connection between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with al Qaeda. Go back and check the record. It had nothing to do with al Qaeda he said that they had they had evidence that Iraq on its own was planning sabotage inside the U.S. an attack inside the U.S. in the lead up to the attack on on Iraq that was pretty much a done deal come in they could see it

coming sort of thing I'm not apologizing for anybody in this instance but that is the substance of what. Putin said and it's it was it was basically a huge digression because it really hadn't and it was kind of amazing in the reaction to it because. Anyway going on. Among on of the groups besides Tom Clancy that had the idea of the attack through. You come in during a when a vehicle airliner was a Library of Congress report. So not a particularly high level intelligence outfit but actually maybe a higher level than many of the purportedly high level outfits. I guess that's higher not ironic in your assessment overall that this is the substantive kind of impartial thing it is certainly not agreed to by a lot of people around the. The. The family has a number of groups citizens who NINE ONE ONE citizens

watch other groups who are picking it apart and contesting it and when you have someone like R.. How are neighboring states Representative Hamilton on board I mean he was supposed to be getting to the bottom of the Iran-Contra and kind of just walked away from it. John Kerry did more to study the Iran-Contra thing than Hamilton ever did and he used an apparatchik right inside the beltway and I know what a lot of people's assessments are contrary to your personal. A lot of points of their own. Couple Well when we do have some other call serious I want to give the guest a chance if you want to respond to some of the comments the caller yes. Yes he's right about swearing in they started swearing in when he got to Washington and dealt with the serious policy issues. And Putin now I don't have that clip in front of me. All I know is what I read the

paper it but I could have sworn he was talking about that Russian intelligence had had seen a connection between Saddam and weapons of mass destruction I think that's what his leak was. Am I not right now if he has resigned. Well I do my apologies I put it. I'm back on hold so you know I think I'm pretty sure that that's what they were indeed talking about as far as the families they do strongly support the 9/11 Commission report and there I'm sure there are individuals who don't. But as a group they're strongly supporting it and they're there behind the heavy pressure on the Bush administration to to make sure that somebody is going to know that. Do we are getting short on time and I have some other callers and I just can't give the caller more time right now I want to go ahead though and go to the next in line. We have someone in McLean County on our toll free line line for Hello.

Hello good morning. I'd just like to make a comment. And I know it's a little off the current discussion but I remember the day 9/11 very well and I was extremely feeling extremely angry about the fact that it happened and nobody seemed to talk about the fact that in 93 when the World Trade Center was bombed I don't know why. No one ever thought that they would come back again. And I'm just making a comment. Thank you for letting me take it because just listening to the conversation start to get me very angry again because I still don't. And I just wish I could figure this out why someone and I hear one thing and all the people but it's like I don't understand why we have our heads buried in the sand when we're dealing with people fanatical and we just leave them so thinking that we live in us and we have oceans on both sides and two sides and countries that are relatively you know friendly on north and south of

us. Nothing would happen to us. And anyway so thank you for letting me decide to stand church and have a good day. Thank you. Anything you want to pick up on that at all. Yes I think we should beat ourselves up too badly over having missed this. I think they're worse in retrospect you can see a lot of evidence that could have been picked up on. You wish a couple more steps have been taken in some of these cases. It's right that we're reforming the intelligence system to make all these guys worry about us to make more people worry about this kind of it's about this kind of terrorist potential. But I think we're just stronger as a country after all this happened to us I think we're not going to be surprised and shocked and dismayed about what happens now. We're going to be much more effective in dealing with this with this in the future in responding to but then Szell problems in hunting these guys down there's nowhere for that.

Maybe there was a place for them to hide before there's no place for them to hide now. And I was just I just feel more optimistic New York is doing pretty well these days and I just think that something even if something did happen here tomorrow I think we'd respond to it with much more spirit and much more forthrightness and direction of much more quickly than we did after 9/11. Let's go on to another caller the person is in Charleston and slower in number two. Hello. Do you perceive that 9/11 and other events for 200 years of modern times on both sides have happened in a vacuum. Do you understand what I'm saying. Complete your point. Well there are two sides to every story. Yes and so far we've heard only one. Therein lies the crux of the matter.

People respond. It's like any bully ism that its staff around the world the bully takes the territory. But he didn't have eyes in the back of his head and sooner or later those who are oppressed by people will respond. Hence no thank you. Well that's very soppy and. But what what's your point about the other which I think those airplanes were flown into the building. Just because someone woke up one day and said let's go get him you know I mean there's a history behind all that stuff in our incursions into the Arab and Islamic world into Africa followed on the heels of the British who preceded us. Think of all the travails of India you know where when dynamite was discovered and then they went to work with. I mean what happened to diplomacy and fairness and to honesty and all the other things that exist in this world to

prevent things like 9/11 when Ronald Reagan killed several people in Lebanon. You know those boys died for nothing. Get people a girl down a little truck in there with all those explosives on it. Were they just getting up something to do that day. Because it is just occurs to me that those things are. I don't reckon a matter practice conducive to the behavior of the parties involved. Well you're painting with a very broad brush and if I can paint with a brush that is just that broad I would say that the well-meant of a History is basically positive it's not negative. The world is shrinking. We're seeing more institutions that allow the world to get along together. More people joining common organizations no matter what their culture is common organizations like the World Trade Organization. We're seeing more global institutions. The United Nations is becoming more useful not less useful. And I think we're heading towards

a an era where perhaps all we have to worry about is the stray individual or group which is a preferable era to the constant divisions in global warfare. I need to jump in because we're just about out of time and we have maybe about a minute or so. The Bush administration obviously wants to make it look like they're taking the recommendations of the commission very seriously and have been having meetings and talking about apparently what they can do to follow up on and to implement some of the recommendations of the commission at the same time people who know how slowly things can work in Washington politics observing the fact that we're near the end of the session and we're coming up to an election. Make it sound as if not very much is going to be done before the beginning of next year. And just generally you know acknowledge the fact that getting things done in Washington is not easy.

I wonder do you have a particular feeling about just how many of the recommendations of. Commission particularly the the ones that are really big that we're likely to see come to pass. Well of the three big ones reorganizing the the the the executive departments counterterrorism processing center is something that Bush could do especially with the snap of a finger and a lot of hard work to catch up to the policy. The other involving adding a new cabinet level officer and rearranging budget procedures and that would also take a rearrangement of the way Congress considers the intelligence budget. It will take a lot more work and I think what Bush and Kerry are both doing now is positioning themselves politically. It's very easy for Kerry to say and he does. Let's do everything let's do it now and let's keep the 9/11 commission up and monitoring everything. And Bush for his part has to look like he's taking swift action on this. He doesn't want to

be. They have the policy that they have the issue turned against him. But I think in reality there's not a whole lot he could do immediately. Well I think that the point we're going to have to stop because we've come to the end of the time I want thank Mr. Strawson very much for talking with us today. Well thank you. Our guest Stephen Stross or it teaches journalism at Rutgers University. And he is a former correspondent and editor at Newsweek magazine the book. If you'd like to look at it is the 9/11 investigations bringing together the staff reports of the 9/11 commission with some excerpts from the House Senate joint inquiry report on 9/11 and some of the testimony of the key witnesses called before the 9/11 Commission. It's published by Public Affairs Books.