Most of us remember where we were and what we were doing, five years ago. Lee Hamilton does too.
The former Indiana congressman (a Democrat from Jeffersonville) — was on a plane, waiting for a 9:55 a.m. flight from Washington to Indianapolis. He never left the ground. When a flight attendant told the passengers to get off the plane, Hamilton walked with everyone else into a world made completely different by events that morning in New York City, Washington and a field in Pennsylvania.
While all of us have lived with 9/11 since, Hamilton has had more intimate contact with the day that changed everything.
Experience, reputation and circumstance would put him at the heart and head table of the efforts to determine what happened that day and what to do to keep it from happening again. As co-chairman of the 10-member, bipartisan 9/11 Commission, it put him in the crossfire of conflicting ideas and interests engendered by the shock and tragedy (and, perhaps, the exploitation by interested parties) of 9/11.
The commission issued its unanimous report in 2004, but Hamilton and co-chairman Thomas Kean, the former Republican governor of New Jersey, felt there was more to tell, a commitment to history to offer “a candid and comprehensive account of how we conducted the inquiry,” Hamilton said.
A new book
Together, they wrote the just-published Without Precedent, a 370-page book ($25.95, Knopf) about how the panel did its work, despite party differences and major obstacles to clarity.
Several weeks ago, right after the exposure of the liquid-explosives-on-a-plane plot in Great Britain, I spoke with Hamilton by phone for almost an hour and asked him mostly about issues addressed in the new book. He spoke from his office in Washington, where he is president and director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
Some points Hamilton made in our conversation:
On having the Aug. 6, 2001, Presidential Daily Briefing (“Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.”) publicly released: “Tom and I had many, many meetings with (now Attorney General Alberto) Gonzales, who was kind of the chief White House operative here. There isn’t any doubt this White House has an unprecedented view of the powers of the presidency most particularly when it comes to guarding national security secrets.
“Most of this came to a head in the negotiations over the PDBs, the most sensitive classified documents. I had been in Congress for 34 years, I had never seen one. We asked for access to them and their initial response was absolutely not. Tom and I began to think about ways and means to handle the question. Eventually we worked out satisfactory access to it.”
On how Congress has fallen down on its oversight function in the intelligence area: “I personally interviewed almost every member of the Senate and House intelligence committees and the word that came to me again and again, from Republicans and Democrats, was the intelligence authorizing committees are dysfunctional not doing the job of robust oversight of the intelligence community that needs to be done.
“In the intelligence area, you have no independent oversight of the intelligence community — by independent, I mean other than the president — other than Congress. If the Congress doesn’t do its job here, nobody does it The media can’t fill in for them, you’re not informed about a lot of the bigger stuff. It’s a very serious failing of the Congress today.”
On continuing conspiracy theories about 9/11, despite 200 pages of footnotes in the original 9/11 report:
“It’s just part of the territory. We found no evidence that the hijackers were disguised as pilots and were seated in the jump seats. We found no evidence that the United States military had any prior warning of the attacks. We found no evidence that the U. S. military was involved in the attacks. We found no evidence that the Saudi nationals were able to leave the United States before national airspace opened up. We found no evidence that airline stocks were manipulated before Sept. 11.
“We had, for example, people telling us that the world towers did not collapse because of an airplane hitting them but because dynamite was placed in the building. One of our staff members, a naval officer at the Pentagon, was badly burned, almost lost his life and his burns came from jet fuel.”
And on whether he rests easy at night, knowing everything he knows:
“Yes, I do, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have worries. I worry about being hit again. I worry most about a nuclear attack — that would not be the most likely event but it would be in a class by itself where consequences are concerned.
“When I’m sitting on an airplane, I worry more about what’s in the cargo hold than I worry about the people on the airplane. And I worry about the lack of progress in detection.
“I was appalled the other day to hear the secretary of DHS (homeland security) talking about pilot programs of detection on liquid explosives. We have known about liquid explosives prior to 9/11 and five years after the event to see that we’re only at the pilot program, well, that’s very distressing to me and is an example of the lack of urgency which I consider to be the chief problem of government today in this whole area.”
