Wednesday, May 19, 2004

Our Hero: Rudy Giuliani comes through again, this time with a piece of common sense and a much needed criticism of the way the 9/11 Commission is attacking people at the hearings.

"Our enemy is not each other, but the terrorists who attacked us," Giuliani said softly and without anger in his opening statement to the panel. "The blame should clearly be directed at one source and one source alone, the terrorists who killed our loved ones," Giuliani said.

This comes one day after commission members chastised officials in charge of the rescue operations at the World Trade Center for communication mishaps that were "not worthy of the Boy Scouts."

Yes, there were terrible communication problems that led to many deaths at the World Trade Center. But the 9/11 Commission has to find some constructive means of critiquing what happened without the political grandstanding. The rescuers hadn't imagined such a scenario as 9/11 in their worst nightmares. But they had to bravely solve the problems in the heat of battle.

There's much we can learn about the mistakes that were made on 9/11 -- from the rescue operations, the intelligence gathering, and the political administration. But the route the 9/11 Commission is taking won't provide any help.

The actions of the commission members have robbed the body of all credibility. Both sides have engaged in such partisan attacks that neither side will accept the findings -- except to find ammunition for the upcoming election.

It's a crying shame. There's so much we need to learn from those events. Maybe someday we can take a rational look at what went right and what went wrong that day, and leave the politics and grandstanding aside.