Terror panelists keep interest levels elevated

As the 9/11 Commission formally dissolves, members act as missionaries for their ideas about reform.

ST. LOUIS, Mo. - James R. Thompson loved the campaign trail. Big and jovial, with mischievous blue eyes and a knack for connecting with voters, he was Illinois' longest-serving governor, a political legend now making the transition to elder statesman.

He took to the stump again last week, driving down from Chicago to St. Louis and a ballroom packed with amiable Rotarians munching on Salisbury steak and carrot cake. These were his people - Midwestern, civic-minded, conservative in life and politics.

After making the requisite Cubs versus Cardinals jokes, Thompso n hoisted a copy of the 9/11 Commission's damning report on the state of America's intelligence network. As a member of the commission, he helped write it.

He beseeched them: Do not let your elected leaders - including President Bush - play politics with America's safety. Democrat or Republican, when the politicians ask for your vote this fall, ask them a few things, too:

"Where do you stand on this?" Thompson said, waving the report. "If you're against the recommendations, tell us why - and tell us before the election.

"If something bad happens, and it's traced back to a failure to put in place policies of the kind advocated in this book, the political punishment coming from the American people will be harsh indeed, and it may last for generations."

From its earliest days as a presidential commission that the president opposed, to the unusual bipartisanship that gave it credibility, to the engaging language that helped make its report a bestseller upon its release last month, the 9/11 Commission has made history.

Now the 10 commissioners are taking another historic step: Following through. From Atlanta to St. Louis to San Francisco, commission members have fanned out across the country to appeal directly to voters, urging them to push Congress and the president to act on their recommendations for overhauling America's intelligence network.

Amy Zegart, a public policy expert at the University of California at Los Angeles, has studied 650 presidential commissions from the last 20 years, and said this one is remarkable. "Almost every commission starts off by saying we're not going to be like those other commissions that end up in the dust heap of history, but almost all of them do. This is something bold and different."

No other commission, even those convened after Pearl Harbor and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, has so captured the nation's attention. More than 500,000 paperback copies of its report have been sold.

The magic of the 9/11 report is this: Unlike most national tragedies that produce commissions, the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, on New York City and Washington, D.C., touched everyone.

Beyond killing nearly 3,000, the attacks changed the way Americans fly. Billions of dollars have been diverted to security. America invaded Afghanistan.

The 9/11 Commission stopped short of declaring the attacks preventable, but it identified 10 missed opportunities for foiling or apprehending some of the hijackers. It presented specific, easily understandable recommendations for addressing the gaps. How well they are implemented, the commission says, could hold life and death consequences for ordinary Americans.

At the Rotary Club meeting in the century-old Missouri Athletic Club, a bastion of the St. Louis establishment, the commission's work was powerful enough to prompt even these comfortable Rotarians to agitate for change.

When Thompson finished taking questions, he was mobbed by members asking him to sign copies of the 9/11 report.

"Maybe people in the Beltway need to come out here more often," St. Louis Circuit Judge Mark H. Neill remarked after getting his copy signed. "People in the Midwest and throughout the country want some action immediately. We don't want more hearings.

"We realize the government moves slowly, but we want to protect lives, and our way of living."

Appointing a presidential commission is usually an administration's way of appearing to take action without having to do much, said Ken Warren, a political science professor at St. Louis University who has studied the lackluster work of commissions.

"They're essentially to whitewash a problem, to table a problem, to get rid of the problem," he said. "Never has one gotten so much attention, or is as important, and it's something people can relate to."

Never has a commission taken time to campaign for its work. The 9/11 commissioners typically make the rounds in pairs, one Democrat and one Republican. They have made their pitch from the Pacific Northwest to the Southeast, from the Northeast to Southern California. Commissioners Richard Ben-Veniste and Slade Gorton were in San Francisco this week.

Commissioner Tim Roemer, a former Democratic congressman from Indiana, was to have accompanied Thompson to St. Louis, but knee surgery interfered. Thompson traveled alone, starting his day on a popular morning show on KMOX-AM, the "Voice of St. Louis."

Thompson's trip was more campaign swing than lecture tour, and the 68-year-old tapped the oratory skills that kept him in the governor's mansion from 1977 to 1991: Define the problem, establish your credibility, sell your solutions. Along the way, dispatch your critics.

At each stop, Thompson warned his audience that al-Qaida will strike again. Maybe not with airplanes, but with something designed to intimidate the nation and wrack the economy: Coordinated car bombings, perhaps, or poisoned produce in supermarkets in multiple cities. America shouldn't start posting guards by the lettuce, Thompson said, but the nation must do what it can "to lessen the chances of this happening again."

At each stop, he reminded his audience that the five Republicans and five Democrats on the commission never voted along party lines. "Here we were, 10 people appointed by the most partisan leaders in the most partisan city in the country, and we came to a unanimous conclusion," he told the Rotary Club.

"Nothing else in America this year or last has been unanimous. So I think that says something."

At each stop, he took on criticism about the report. Especially controversial is the recommendation to create a national intelligence director with broad budgetary and personnel authority over America's 15 disparate intelligence agencies, which President Bush opposes.

The idea is to improve communication within the intelligence community, which the 9/11 report found sorely lacking. In one case, the CIA did not alert the FBI that a terrorist likely was traveling to the United States; on Sept. 11, 2001, the man helped crash American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon.

Meeting with the editorial board of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Thompson noted that the Defense Department - which controls 80 percent of the nation's $40-billion intelligence budget - was telling lawmakers in Washington that centralization might keep soldiers from quickly getting the intelligence they need on the battlefield. He scoffed.

"I don't think anyone's going to say, "I'm sorry, lieutenant; I would have given you the information before, but I have to give it to the national intelligence director first,"' Thompson told the editors.

At each stop, he was politically gentle, lauding Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry for endorsing all of the commission's 41 recommendations, while saying he understood why President Bush must move more slowly.

And at each stop, he told his audience they should not be satisfied until reform begins. A Post-Dispatch editor asked how the commission expects to get Congress to act. Thompson leaned across the wooden conference table: "Get your readers to start asking their congressmen and senators, and candidates for the Congress and Senate, "Do you support the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission?' "

After making his case for 90 minutes, Thompson tapped the book one more time: "This only works if something happens because of it."

Sunday, the paper rewarded him with an editorial calling on Congress to implement the commission's reforms.

The political strength of the 9/11 Commission is hardly up for debate. The wisdom of how it's using that strength is.

With Congress in its third week of hearings on the report, some intelligence experts question whether the recommendations are wholly appropriate. Most everyone agrees the intelligence system is disjointed and needs reform, but some worry the commission will bully lawmakers or the White House into taking swift action, without exploring other options.

"I think Congress and the president are right in that there needs to be a debate," said Dr. Jeffrey Cohen, a Fordham University political science professor who studies bureaucracies.

Zegart, the policy expert at UCLA, said the 9/11 Commission "should not be able to corner the market. There's no one clear magic answer here. ... It's really important that the 9/11 Commission be treated as a serious view, but not the only view."

But Zegart, who testified Wednesday before the Senate intelligence committee, also is writing a book about why the U.S. intelligence system adapted so poorly to the threat of terrorism before Sept. 11, 2001, despite a raft of studies and commissions urging reform.

Many of the reforms the 9/11 Commission suggested, such as establishing an intelligence czar and providing for better coordination between the FBI and the CIA, are more than a decade old, but only now are they gaining traction. She mostly credits the zeal of the commissioners.

"The opportunities for reform are few and fleeting," Zegart said. "I worry more that we will miss this opportunity for reform - more than we will make changes we later regret."

By 5 p.m., Thompson's tour of St. Louis had taken him about everywhere but the Gateway Arch. He sat for four TV interviews, guested on radio shows, addressed the Rotary Club and endured a half-dozen print interviews.

His last stop was a half-hour public affairs show on Fox. "Once you spend a year and a half together on something like this," Thompson said on the show, "it's just hard to let go."

His knees ached, and he walked slowly from the studio to his car. Ahead was a five-hour ride back to Chicago.

The 9/11 Commission legally expires today, as does its federal funding, but the commissioners have taken one more historic step: They are incorporating the commission as a nonprofit organization, so it can solicit tax-deductible donations to keep a skeleton staff and to allow the members to continue traveling, to keep campaigning.

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