9/11 Commission Recomendations For First Responder Network, Civil Liberties Unmet 10 Years After The Attack
On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Glen Klein, an officer with the New York Police Department's elite Emergency Service Unit, found himself at a command post just down the street from the World Trade Center, engulfed in dust from the collapse of the south tower.
Hundreds of firefighters and police officers remained in the burning north tower as responders on the ground struggled to reach them with urgent warnings to evacuate.
"It was like Armageddon on the radios," Klein, 53, said in an interview near his home on Long Island. "We couldn't get through."
NYPD helicopters hovering over the north tower observed fires raging on its top floors and advised commanders on the ground to immediately evacuate the building. Those transmissions successfully reached police officers in the tower -- but not firefighters, whose radios were not linked to the NYPD network. As police officers hurried downward, many firefighters lingered on low floors or continued to climb upward toward certain death.
"I truly believe that if the firemen were able to listen to our frequency, a lot of guys would have got out of the building," Klein said.
The communication breakdown between the police and fire department cost many firefighters their lives, the bipartisan commission on the terrorist attacks concluded in 2004. Commissioners recommended a major initiative to bolster emergency communications nationwide and called for the creation of a mobile broadband network dedicated exclusively to first responders.
Yet 10 years after the Sept. 11 attacks, the construction of an interoperable wireless network for first responders has not been approved by Congress. The failure to create the network is just one of nine major recommendations by the 9/11 Commission that Congress, the executive branch or federal, state and local authorities have either not acted on at all or only partially implemented, members of the panel said in a report in early September. Among the other outstanding business: streamlining congressional oversight, setting up an effective board to balance civil liberties with security and instituting a standardized national ID system.
"Overall we're much better off, but we still have glaring vulnerabilities and they need to be addressed," John Lehman, a 9/11 commissioner and Navy Secretary under President Reagan, said in an interview.
Some of these shortcomings involve security measures to protect Americans from future attack. The failure of foreign terrorists to successfully carry out another significant terror attack on U.S. soil since 2001 -- despite repeated attempts -- is a clear indication of the nation's broad success in the battle against al Qaeda and other terrorists, commissioners said.
The death of Osama bin Laden at the hands of U.S. forces also represents a major achievement by the country's intelligence agencies and military in taking the offensive in the fight against terrorism.
But thwarted attacks by homegrown extremists and foreign cells in the past several years indicate that, despite the weakened capabilities of al Qaeda, terrorist threats on American soil will remain a reality for years and decades to come.
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