Hart-Rudman! Hart-Rudman! Hart-Rudman!

[BrklynLiberal]

Where the hell was BushCo's action on this report??!!!!
Condlieza Rice has some nerve saying that Clinton's claims on Faux News were false. She is a bald faced liar!!!!

http://www.emergency.com/2001/21stcentury_rpt.htm

08:00CST - 02 Feb 2001

Hart/Rudman -- 21st Century Commission Recommends New Anti-Terror Cabinet Agency

A bipartisan panel led by former US senators Warren B. Rudman and Gary Hart on Wednesday called for the creation of a Cabinet-level agency to assume responsibility for defending the United States against the increasing likelihood of terrorist attacks in the country. The commission making the recommendation included high-ranking military and former Cabinet secretaries. Their report warned bluntly that terrorists probably will attack the US with nuclear, chemical or biological weapons at some point within the next 25 years.

The commission proposed a complete redesign of the National Guard to provide the proposed new "Homeland Security Agency" with U.S.-based troops to combat those who threaten a nation that for more than two centuries was isolated from attack by two oceans. The panel outlined a far-reaching reorganization of the Pentagon, State Department, National Security Council and other agencies, saying that they have become bloated and unfocused. The report even urged Congress to streamline its own committee structure to keep interference in national security matters at a minimum.

The commission acknowledged that implementing the recommendations would be difficult. Congress would have to pass legislation authorizing the changes. If all of the recommendations were to become law, it would mark the most sweeping renovation of US defense and foreign policy operations since approval of the landmark National Security Act of 1947. Like that measure, which refocused World War II-era agencies on the challenges of the Cold War, the commission's plan is intended to ready the nation for starkly different threats in a new century.
...
lots more at above link

http://www.csbaonline.org/4Publications/Archive/B.20000419.Hart-Rudman_Commis/B.20000419.Hart-Rudman_Commis.htm

Hart-Rudman Commission Report-A Critique
Andrew F. Krepinevich, Michael G. Vickers and Steven M. Kosiak Published 04/19/2000
Backgrounder
Today, the US Commission on National Security/21st Century released its report, Seeking A National Strategy: A Concert for Preserving Security and Promoting Freedom. The commission, chaired by former US Senators Gary Hart and Warren Rudman, is an independent panel created by Congress to conduct “the most comprehensive review of American Security since the National Security Act of 1947 was signed into law over 50 years ago.” Specifically, the goal of this report was to “design a national security strategy” appropriate for the changed world of the 21st century.

The commission’s task was an enormously difficult and ambitious one. Moreover, it was made all the more difficult by the decision to limit the report’s recommendations and findings to areas where consensus could be reached among the panel’s 14 members.

Overall, the commission performs a modest, but important, service in outlining a range of US security interests and strategic objectives. Unfortunately, it comes up short in its most important (and difficult) task: crafting a strategy for preserving US security in what it rightly observes is a rapidly changing, and increasingly challenging, security environment. As discussed at the end of this analysis, fundamentally, strategy is about setting priorities and making choices between competing alternatives under conditions of limited resources. Unfortunately, the commission fails to clearly set strategic priorities, make choices among competing alternatives for achieving its objectives, or provide a meaningful indication of the resources that would be required to achieve its objectives. Yet these actions are inherent to crafting a strategy.

The commission does raise a number of important issues in its report. But it generally does not provide meaningful guidance concerning those issues. This critique focuses on ten of the policy areas identified in the report that could have major implications for defense strategy and budgetary requirements:

* Homeland Defense

* Missile Defenses

* Two-War Strategy

* More Money for Defense

* Power Projection and Future Forces

* Preemption and Nuclear First Use

* Geopolitics

* Role of Allies

* Intervention Criteria

* Space and Cyberspace
<snip>

details at link

If you want to read the entire report, here is a link to a PDF version of the whole report.

http://govinfo.library.unt.edu/nssg/PhaseIIIFR.pdf#search=%22hart-rudman%22

[madrchsod]

1. oh... you better watch out you`ll be on the list...

wait we all are aren`t we? yes the hart rudman report another fine document that was ignored by bush. he didn`t care about bin boy because he was after saddam to show his daddy that he was a better man than him....

[BrklynLiberal]

2. It was all laid out in minute detail for BushCo...and it was ignored.

And they STILL have the nerve to say they had no plans given to them...nothing given to them that would have given them an idea about what to do about the terrorism that might have been looming in the future.

I do not understand how anyone with an ounce of sense can believe one word these liars say.

[blm]

3. Heh - FINALLY, people are waking up and smelling the HartRudman Report.

So posting about it some 3000 times hasn't been a waste. ;)

[BrklynLiberal]

4. It is like screaming at the top on one's lungs at people and they keep

saying..."Huh? Are you saying something? I can't hear you."

[blm]

5. How many times have you heard Hart-Rudman Report mentioned in the media?

.

[oasis]

8. Zero (eom)

[BrklynLiberal]

12. Not enough. That is for sure!!!

[Canuckistanian]

6. Bravo, for the post name alone!

Jeez, if the Democrats even stuck with this ONE ISSUE, they'd be able to debunk this "Clinton didn't do anything to stop bin Laden" meme.

It even outlines the POLITICAL pressures that TONED DOWN the findings of the report, not to mention "streamlining" the process so that various Congressional committees couldn't bog it down (unlike today, of course :sarcasm:)

K&R

[blm]

10. Clinton commissioned this report - he should have championed it as an

ex-president, well aware of the serious nature of its content and do so the way Bush1 championed NAFTA after he left office.

Clinton should have taken up the Hart-Rudman Report on Global Terror.

[Marie26]

7. They ignored it.

And they ignored all the report's recommendations. Instead, the White House actually shut down the Hart-Rudman commission, and appointed Cheney to create a counter-terrorism plan. This article lays out all the incompetence & arrogance by the Bush Ad. Dems really should be screaming about this.

Commission warned Bush

But White House passed on recommendations by a bipartisan, Defense department-ordered commission on domestic terrorism.

By Jake Tapper

Sept. 12, 2001 | WASHINGTON -- They went to great pains not to sound as though they were telling the president "We told you so." But on Wednesday, two former senators, the bipartisan co-chairs of a Defense Department-chartered commission on national security, spoke with something between frustration and regret about how White House officials failed to embrace any of the recommendations to prevent acts of domestic terrorism delivered earlier this year.

Bush administration officials told former Sens. Gary Hart, D-Colo., and Warren Rudman, R-N.H., that they preferred instead to put aside the recommendations issued in the January report by the U.S. Commission on National Security/21st Century. Instead, the White House announced in May that it would have Vice President Dick Cheney study the potential problem of domestic terrorism -- which the bipartisan group had already spent two and a half years studying -- while assigning responsibility for dealing with the issue to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, headed by former Bush campaign manager Joe Allbaugh. The Hart-Rudman Commission had specifically recommended that the issue of terrorism was such a threat it needed far more than FEMA's attention.

Before the White House decided to go in its own direction, Congress seemed to be taking the commission's suggestions seriously, according to Hart and Rudman. "Frankly, the White House shut it down," Hart says. "The president said 'Please wait, we're going to turn this over to the vice president. We believe FEMA is competent to coordinate this effort.' And so Congress moved on to other things, like tax cuts and the issue of the day."...

For a time, the commission seemed to be on a roll. Congress seemed interested in enacting many of the commission's recommendations. "We had a very good response from the Hill," Rudman says. But in May, Bush announced his plan almost as if the Hart-Rudman Commission never existed, as if it hadn't spent millions of dollars, "consulting with experts, visiting 25 countries worldwide, really deliberating long and hard," as Hart describes it. ... Bush also directed Cheney -- a man with a full plate, including supervision of the administration's energy plans and its dealings with Congress -- to supervise the development of a national counter-terrorism plan. Bush announced that Cheney and Allbaugh would review the issues and have recommendations for him by Oct. 1. The commission's report was seemingly put on the shelf.

http://archive.salon.com/politics/feature/2001/09/12/bush/

So, they completely ignored the Hart-Rudman commission, and instead put Cheney in charge of a counter-terrorism task force. But that task force NEVER MET ONCE before Sept. 11. So what was the Bush Ad. doing about counter-terrorism? Apparently, nothing.

Vice President Cheney's task force on terrorism never met. On May 8, 2001, President Bush announced that Vice President Cheney would "oversee the development of a coordinated national effort so that we may do the very best possible job of protecting our people from catastrophic harm." (Statement by the President) The task force was to focus specifically, in Vice President Cheney's words, on the threat of "domestic terrorism...a terrorist organization overseas or even another state using weapons of mass destruction against the U.S., a hand-carried nuclear weapon or biological or chemical agents." (CNN, 5/8/01) Moreover, President Bush announced that he would "periodically chair a meeting of the National Security Council to review these efforts." (Statement by the President, 5/8/01) The Washington Post reports that, in the four months between the President's announcement and the September 11 attacks, "neither Cheney's review nor Bush's took place." (1/20/02). According to the 9-11 Commission, the Cheney Task Force "was just getting underway when the 9/11 attack occurred." (9-11 Commission, Staff Statement Number 8, "National Policy Coordination," p. 9).

http://democrats.senate.gov/dpc/dpc-new.cfm?doc_name=fs-108-2-99

[midnight]

11. Yes, the Dems should of been screaming this out in the public.

But I think there strategies have been hampered by NSA wire tapping, and Anthrax?

[OneBlueSky]

9. Bush was too busy reading books, don'tcha know . . . n/t

.