Congress delayed giving a portion of the radio spectrum to first responders
By Carol Eisenberg
Newsday (New York)
Copyright 2006 Newsday, Inc.
WASHINGTON — On a day when the nation’s political leaders paid homage to those killed in the Sept. 11 attacks, the chairmen of the bipartisan 9/11 Commission excoriated Congress for failing to enact some of their most basic recommendations — including giving homeland security money to the cities at greatest risk of attack.
“Shouldn’t we be giving money to Washington and New York, the areas we know the terrorists want to attack?” said former New Jersey Gov. Tom Kean, co-chairman of the commission, speaking at a National Press Club luncheon.
“If you had asked any of us on the commission ... ‘What was the easiest one of all the recommendations?’ we would have said, ‘well, probably to give homeland security money on the basis of risk.’ That just sounded so logical and so easy. And yet, five years later, we’re still not doing it.”
Both Kean, a Republican, and 9/11 co-chairman Lee Hamilton, a Democrat, also said it was “pretty inexcusable five years after 9/11" that Congress had delayed giving a portion of the radio spectrum to first responders.
The inability to communicate on a dedicated portion of radio spectrum cost lives not only during the terrorist attacks, but also during Hurricane Katrina, Kean said. Yet a bill before Congress delays awarding a frequency to first responders until 2009, as a result of pressure from the broadcast industry.
“Our frustration is that so many of these recommendations we’ve made are really no-brainers,” Hamilton said. "... We just can’t figure out, frankly, why they haven’t been quickly adopted. And what we see, I think, is a kind of lack of urgency across the board.”
Despite all odds, the two men said that the commission of five Republicans and five Democrats had functioned in a bipartisan way to investigate the 9/11 attacks, and they called on Congress to do the same now to safeguard the nation.
In response to a question about the single most important thing that could be done to make the United States safer, Kean said securing about 100 sites around the world that have enriched uranium.
“We know that a number of those sites, many of them in the ex-Soviet Union, are still not secure, don’t have proper guards, sometimes rusty fences.”
Once a terrorist gets enriched uranium, he said, they could find out how to build a bomb from the Internet. "...And you know the catastrophic effect that that kind of a device set off in one of our major cities would do to our people and to our economy.”