January 8, 2007: on the eve of the 110th Congress’ first one-hundred working hours, promises are in the air. Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, says Congress will pass measures including ethics reform, reduced dependence on foreign oil and adoption of the 9/11 Commission’s recommendations — ones that were originally made in the summer of 2004. In April 2006, nearly two years after the original 41 recommendations were made, former commission Chairman Thomas H. Kean and Vice Chairman Lee Hamilton had this to say about what had (or had not) been done:

Several of our recommendations were adopted, some suffer from slow implementation and others are still unaddressed. As a nation, we have not done all that we can and should to protect the American people.

To that end, Kean and Hamilton then announced that Barnes & Noble was reprinting the final report, 9/11 Commission Report: Fully Updated with Controversial Third Monograph and Never-Before-Published Progress reports from the 9/11 Commissioners. The hope was that the new edition would “help rekindle citizen interest in our recommendations.” The report is 816 pages long, costs $9.95 and is worth every cent. One of the key points in the new edition was Congressional oversight. Reforms are necessary, it says, but oversight is imperative. And yet according to Kean and Hamilton, post-9/11 oversight reforms were — and remain — among those “sidestepped” by the federal government.

Congress needs powerful Intelligence and Homeland Security oversight committees. Because so much information is classified, Congress is the only source of independent oversight of the full breadth of intelligence and homeland security issues before our country. This oversight does not now happen.

Take the no-fly list for example. The no-fly list was touted by the Department of Homeland Security as a hallmark of aviation security reform. It was a great idea in theory — to keep dangerous people off airplanes — but there was no oversight committee around to monitor and question its effectiveness. Instead, it took the excellent work of two investigative journalists, Susan B. Trento and Joseph J. Trento, together with 60 Minutes, to reveal what Congress ignored: the no-fly list is a paper tiger. That dead people are on the list and that everyone named ‘Robert Johnson’ is on the list is outrageous. But that many top level terrorists have been deliberately left off the list is a travesty. The rationale, according to one CIA official, now retired, goes like this (from the Trentos’ book, Unsafe at Any Altitude):

I cannot describe to you how reluctant our operational people were to turn over names. Many terrorists act as assets for our case officers. We do deal with bad guys, and, like cops protect snitches, we protect ours, too, and none of those guys is going to show up on the no-fly list anytime soon. So we made a deal. The CIA effectively has the ability to allow people to fly who are on the no-fly list if we deem it in the national interest — just not on domestic airlines.

Why did it take two journalists and a TV show to do what Congress could not, or would not, do? Kean and Hamilton weigh in: “turf battles have kept the oversight committees weak. To protect our country, as well as our civil liberties, Congress must perform robust oversight of the Executive branch.”

Here’s to robust oversight, Madam Speaker.

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