reality-based educator

No surprise here - we're not safer than we were four years ago. From the NY Times:

WASHINGTON, Dec. 5 - The members of the Sept. 11 commission gave dismal grades to the Bush administration and Congress on Monday in measuring the government's recent efforts to prevent terrorist attacks on American soil, concluding that the government deserved many more F's and D's than A's.

The commissioners awarded the grades in a privately financed "report card" that found that four years after the Sept. 11 attacks, the nation remained alarmingly vulnerable to terrorist strikes, including attacks with chemical, biological or nuclear weapons.

"While the terrorists are learning and adopting, our government is still moving at a crawl," said Thomas H. Kean, the commission's chairman and a former Republican governor of New Jersey. "Many obvious steps that the American people assume have been completed have not been. Our leadership is distracted."

The new report by the 9/11 Public Discourse Project, a private group established by the commission's five Republicans and five Democrats when the panel formally went out of business last year, graded the government's response to the 41 recommendations made in the commission's final report 17 months ago.

There were 17 F's or D's - including an F to Congress for its failure to allocate the domestic antiterrorism budget on the basis of risk and a D for the government's effort to track down and secure nuclear material that could be used by terrorists. There was only one A - and it was an A minus - awarded for the government's efforts to stem the financing of terrorist networks.

...

The White House, which often tangled with the Sept. 11 commission during its official investigation, defended its performance in dealing with terrorist threats, insisting it had acted on most of the panel's recommendations.

"We have taken significant steps to better protect the American people at home," said Scott McClellan, the White House spokesman. "There is more to do. This is the president's highest responsibility."

To the likely disappointment of the White House, however, the commission's Republicans voiced some of the strongest criticism of the administration and Congress on Monday at a news conference held to release the report.

"The American people ought to demand answers," said James R. Thompson, a Republican commissioner and a former Illinois governor. "Why aren't our tax dollars being spent to protect our lives? What's the rationale? What's the excuse? There is no excuse."

Mr. Thompson joined with other commissioners in offering special criticism of Congress as having failed to ensure that the billions of dollars in domestic security money distributed by the federal government each year are divided up on the basis of risk, instead of pork-barrel politics that often sends money to remote areas where there is little danger of terrorist attack.

The new report noted that Congress and the Bush administration enacted the commission's centerpiece recommendation last year, the creation of the job of director of national intelligence to force the government's spy agencies to work closely together. The post went to John D. Negroponte, the former American ambassador to Iraq and the United Nations.

"The framework for the D.N.I. and his authorities are in place," the report found, giving an overall grade of B to Mr. Negroponte's performance and to the government's effort to support him.

The report gave a failing grade to the administration's development of common policies for treatment of terrorist suspects held abroad; human rights groups and some members of Congress have accused the administration of condoning practices that amount to torture. The administration has opposed legislation to prohibit the use of cruel and degrading treatment against detainees in American custody.

"U.S. treatment of detainees had elicited broad criticism and makes it harder to build the necessary alliances to cooperate effectively with partners in a global war on terror," the report said.

Mr. Kean said at the news conference that as a result of the controversy over the treatment of prisoners, the United States "is not viewed with the same respect we were just a short time ago."

Timothy J. Roemer, a Democratic commissioner and a former House member from Indiana, said inhumane treatment of prisoners was counterproductive and might breed a new generation of terrorists. "We should not go down the slippery slope of what other countries might do to terrorize detainees," he said.

The new report was also strongly critical of the government's failures to tighten airline passenger screening, to provide adequate radio spectrums to allow police and fire departments to communicate in a terrorist attack and to push for political reforms in Saudi Arabia.

There was sharp criticism of Congress as having failed to overhaul its methods of oversight on intelligence issues, and of the F.B.I. as moving too slowly to overhaul its antiterrorism operations.

Meanwhile, ABC reports that 10 out of 11 terror suspects held at our secret terrorist prisons in Europe (known as black sites) are subjected to "enhanced interrogation techniques" - an Orwellian euphemism that means "torture":

The CIA declines to comment, but current and former intelligence officials tell ABC News that 11 top al Qaeda figures were all held at one point on a former Soviet air base in one Eastern European country. Several of them were later moved to a second Eastern European country.

All but one of these 11 high-value al Qaeda prisoners were subjected to the harshest interrogation techniques in the CIA's secret arsenal, the so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques" authorized for use by about 14 CIA officers and first reported by ABC News on Nov. 18.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice today avoided directly answering the question of secret prisons in remarks made on her departure for Europe, where the issue of secret prisons and secret flights has caused a furor.

Without mentioning any country by name, Rice acknowledged special handling for certain terrorists.

"The captured terrorists of the 21st century do not fit easily into traditional systems of criminal or military justice, which were designed for different needs. We have had to adapt," Rice said.

Oh, yeah. I feel safer with Bushie, Cheney, Rice, and Rummy in charge.