WASHINGTON, July 22 (UPI) -- President George W. Bush, speaking just hours after receiving a report on the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States, said Thursday terrorists intend to strike again and pledged continued efforts to shore up homeland security to prevent it.
"They intend to strike the United States again," he said in a speech at the Northeastern Illinois Public Safety Training Academy in Glenview. "They are seeking increasingly powerful weapons to kill Americans on an unprecedented scale."
In his speech to first-responders at the academy, Bush outlined administration successes in the war on terror, including the killing or capturing of two-thirds of al-Qaida's top leaders, disrupting terrorist funding mechanisms, the discovery and dismantling of a black market in nuclear-weapons components and convincing Libya to abandon its weapons of mass destruction programs.
"The results of these efforts are solid and clear," he said, "(and) as we conduct the war abroad, we'll always remember where it began -- here in our homeland. We will not permit the terrorists to find sanctuary or safe haven, especially not within our own borders.
"In the past three years, we have dismantled terrorist cells, prosecuted terrorist supporters from California to Florida and Massachusetts. In Lackawanna, New York, we broke up a terrorist cell whose members had trained in an al-Qaida-affiliated camp near Kandahar, Afghanistan. In New Jersey, we indicted a man who was trying to sell shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles for the purpose of downing a U.S. commercial airliner."
Bush said the United States was now safer, but not fully secure. Americans, he added, "can be certain (his) government was doing everything we can to protect our country."
The report by the National Commission on the Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, popularly known as the Sept. 11 Commission, was publicly given to Bush at the White House by former New Jersey Gov. Thomas Kean, chairman of the group, together with co-chairman Lee Hamilton, a former Democratic congressman. Earlier they had given Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, Chief of Staff Andrew Card and White House counsel Alberto Gonzales a half-hour briefing on the report's recommendations for correcting problems that contributed to the attacks on New York and Washington by al-Qaida operatives.
"They recognize what I recognize and America recognizes: that there is still a threat," Bush said in the White House Rose Garden, where he was handed the report. "I look forward to studying their recommendations and look forward to working with responsible parties within my administration to move forward on those recommendations.
"As well, we look forward to working with the Congress on the implementation of ways to do our duty."
The report looked at not just the attacks themselves, but also at the events and circumstances preceding and following them. It did not blame the Bush administration or the Clinton administration but cited a climate of disbelief in the danger of such attacks and institutional failures that kept the attack plot from being discovered and stopped beforehand.
Among the problems cited was a lack of cooperation and sharing of information between the law enforcement and intelligence communities and within the intelligence communities themselves.
In the wake of al-Qaida's attacks on New York and Washington with hijacked airliners, the Bush administration created the Department of Homeland Security, supported passage of the USA Patriot Act, which helps rectify the lack of intelligence sharing, and instituted other measures.
Bush said that after hearing security recommendations from Kean and Hamilton "I assured them that where the government needs to act, we will."
Kean thanked Bush for "unprecedented" cooperation from the White House, which at first was opposed to the idea of the commission, arguing that Congress was already conducting investigations. Bush relented to creation of the panel amid public controversy.
"I ... want to thank you on behalf of the commission for unprecedented access to documents and cooperation from your administration," Kean said. "We were able to see things that no commission or no member of Congress had ever seen in doing our work."
The White House said more than 2.5 million documents, including classified material, were turned over to the panel. In addition, administration officials took part in more than 900 interviews with commission members, 50 appeared before hearings, more than 1,000 audiotapes were handed over for perusal, and more than 170 briefings were provided.
Among those appearing in hearings was Rice, who defended administration actions both before and after the attacks. Also appearing was a former counter-terrorism official who accused the Bush administration of not taking the threat of a domestic terrorist attack by al-Qaida seriously, something the administration vigorously denied.
The impact of the report Thursday on the nation's political climate was predictable: It immediately became an election-year football.
The Democratic National Committee -- noting Bush's citing of Libya's abandonment of WMD, the disrupting of terrorist financing and cells and efforts to streamline and coordinate intelligence gathering as examples of security progress -- quickly weighed in with a release called: "Accomplishments? What Accomplishments?"
"We still do not have a level of timely, routine and unfettered information sharing we know we need to prevent terrorism," it quoted House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Christopher Cox, R-Calif., as saying in an interview last month.
The International Association of Fire Fighters, which has endorsed Democrat John Kerry for president, worried aloud that "the Bush administration will take the commission's report and be long on rhetoric and short on action."
Kerry, in Detroit to address the National Urban League, did not criticize Bush directly but said it was a time for bipartisanship to enact the report's recommendations and "if I am elected president and there has still not been sufficient progress on these issues, I will not wait a single day more. I will lead.
" ... As president, I will not rest until I can look into the eyes of the American people who want a future of freedom and security and say, 'We are as safe as we can be.'"
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