THE 10 members of the 9/11 Commission are releasing their big report this week. Under other circumstances, the issuance of this document could have made them the toasts of America — the wisest of the wise, the cool-headed analysts who sorted through all the data and information and made important judgments that would help make this country safe.Instead, the report will effectively be dead on arrival.
The administration has no reason to take the recommendations seriously, because the commission's members did such an astonishing job discrediting themselves last spring. The supposedly bipartisan commission unexpectedly became a partisan tool, a sledgehammer to be used for the destruction of the Bush administration.
What's most astonishing about their conduct is this key truth: Had the Democrats on the commission kept their mouths shut and their hearings bland, their report could have damaged the administration beyond salvage. Had they bided their time and behaved with sober restraint, the commission's very partisan Dems could have helped John Kerry beyond his and their wildest dreams.
But rather than going for the big knockout punch, the committee's Democrats kept on with the cheap shots. They pretended that a vague August 2001 one-page document was the smoking gun that proved the administration was to blame for failing to prevent 9/11 and turned the testimony of the disgruntled ex-employee Richard Clarke into a media feeding frenzy.
They allowed the committee's staff to issue blistering reports (including one whose executive summary claimed falsely there had never been any relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda) even as they were supposedly still engaged in fact-finding. The commission's members went on TV so frequently in the spring that it became reasonable to ask whether they were actually investigating anything.
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