Chief of Different U.S. Anti-Terror Panel Weighs In
By Matthew B. Stannard
San Francisco Chronicle
July 31, 2004

While both the Bush administration and Congress are promising a speedy response to the report and recommendations of the Sept. 11 commission report, and the public is snapping up copies of the 567-page tome as if it were a Tom Clancy novel, former Virginia governor James Gilmore III is having an attack of deja vu.

He is especially puzzled over how similar the Sept. 11 commission's recommendations seem to those from a commission he headed for five years, until it disbanded this year.

"If this is a wake-up call, they must have hit the snooze button," Gilmore said in an interview. "Why is it such a revelation now?"

The Advisory Panel to Assess Domestic Response Capabilities for Terrorism Involving Weapons of Mass Destruction -- the Gilmore Commission, as it was more often called -- was created after the attacks on American embassies in East Africa in 1998 with a mandate to "assess the capabilities for responding to terrorist incidents in the U.S. homeland involving weapons of mass destruction" and the response capabilities of federal, state and local governments.

The bombings in Tanzania, and Nairobi, Kenya, both attributed to al Qaeda, killed more than 200 people, including 12 Americans, and wounded more than 5, 000, mostly Africans.

Gilmore's commission issued recommendations covering a wide range of reforms, including establishing a civil liberties commission, reviewing legislative responses to terrorism, creating new policies governing cyber- security and developing new vaccines to combat bioterrorism.

Out of 144 recommendations, contained in five separate reports, 125 were at least partly adopted by Congress and other agencies, according to Gilmore. Now, some of the same recommendations have resurfaced in the far more publicized Sept. 11 commission report -- which mentions the Gilmore commission once, in an endnote on page 479, along with other commissions, such as Congress's own Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities before and after the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001.

Where the Gilmore commission recommends using modern technology to share information on potential terrorist threats, the Sept. 11 commission calls for a "network-based information sharing system" to accomplish the same thing.

The Sept. 11 commission's call for the consolidation of congressional anti-terrorism oversight and for the Pentagon to assess the Northern Command's strategy and planning to support civil authorities, replicates in all but the same words, the Gilmore commission's recommendations, some of which he says have already been adopted, at least in part.

"We believe that a lot of congresspeople never focused on our reports, ever -- before or after 9/11," says Gilmore, now a partner in the Washington, D.C., law firm of Kelley Drye & Warren and former chairman of the Republican National Committee.

But he is not resentful. In fact, Gilmore says he is pleased that the Sept. 11 commission -- which had a budget of $15 million and a staff of dozens -- found the work of his much smaller commission -- with one-third the funding and a handful of staffers -- worth repeating.

And if the "new" recommendations -- released by a high-profile commission during a presidential campaign -- get more attention and action directed at combatting terrorism than they have in the past, so much the better, Gilmore said.

But Gilmore has one major disagreement with the Sept. 11 commission, and it has to do with one of the latter's key recommendations.

The recommended creation of a national intelligence director overseeing the CIA, FBI and Defense Intelligence Agency is a misplaced bureaucratic fix, Gilmore believes.

"I don't think it's been very well thought through," he said. "This is a recipe for chaos and division and competition that we don't need. We need to be streamlining this, not adding more positions to have turf battles with each other."

However, the idea, which was also contained in the joint congressional committee report in 2002, was tentatively embraced by the Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs, which held hearings on the Sept. 11 report Friday.

At the hearing, the Sept. 11 commission's chairman, former New Jersey GOP governor Thomas Kean, said intelligence failures before Sept. 11 happened because "no one was the quarterback, no one was calling the plays." His vice chairman, former Democratic House member Lee Hamilton, said the new position the commission recommended would solve that problem.

"We come to the recommendation of a national intelligence director not because we want to create some new czar or a new layer of bureaucracy to sit atop the existing bureaucracy," he said. "We come to this recommendation because we see it as the only way to effect what we believe is necessary -- a complete transformation of the way the intelligence community works."

But the same goals could be accomplished, says Gilmore, by giving the current head of the CIA coordinating and budget authority over the other intelligence agencies and clear presidential mandate to use that power -- something Gilmore feels President Bush has shown the willingness to do.

After that, Gilmore said, the nation should also look back to his commission's reports for some ideas that the newest commission did not address.

"We have to have a national strategy that folds in the states and locals, " he said. "I don't think the Sept. 11 commission discussed the states and locals at all; that has been a central focus of our commission."

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