9/11 commission off mission in NYC

It seems almost perverse that while those in official Washington have so far escaped harsh criticism for the failures surrounding the 9/11 attacks, the people that heroically put themselves on the line are the ones being blasted.

In New York City, no less.

And yet the 9/11 commission and its staff came to town and, after a brief nod to the heroism of the day, started throwing around blame.

One commission member, John Lehman, said that he thought New York's disaster response plans were "not worthy of the Boys Scouts."

"You make it sound like everything went wrong on Sept. 11," said Thomas Von Essen, the New York fire commissioner at the time of the attacks. "I think it's outrageous that you make a statement like that."

Lest we forget, Von Essen's department lost 343 people that day.

Finding fault - after the fact - with how rescuers responded to an attack on a scale unimaginable to any sane human being seems like bureaucracy run amok. Let the mayor of New York or the fire chief examine communication structures and equipment needs. Perhaps the 9/11 commission is just eating the elephant one bite at a time, but it seems as if they should be focusing on how we prevent, say, a chemical attack on a subway or a bomb at a ball game.

On the Washington leg of the commission tour no one could make a statement or answer a question without political motivations being assumed or having partisan fingers being pointed at them. And, of course, nothing was resolved.

Listen, people, 9/11 was not a political event for which Republicans were more to blame than the Democrats or vice versa. It was an attack, an act of war, by America's enemies on all of us, Democrat and Republican alike.

Perhaps it is this persnickety, partisan approach by the commission that caused relatives of some of the victims to shout out in protest during former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani's testimony. Their frustration is understandable, certainly, as they are focused more on what happened rather than on a future that was taken away from many of them on 9/11. Truly, how can they feel as if they are ever going to get answers if this is the approach taken by the commission or those who testify before it.

After the outburst by victims' relatives, Giuliani, as he was so many times in the aftermath of the attacks, was once again the voice of reason.

"The blame should be put on one source alone, the terrorists who killed our loved ones," Giuliani said.

Police and fire department say they have made improvements in how the agencies will communicate in future events. Clearly New York is the best place for such solutions to be found.

The emotional nature of the day's testimony shows that the scars from that day linger barely beneath the surface, especially in New York.

The blame game went all the way down to commission staff saying that private businesses should have conducted more employee drills for such terrorist attacks.

Let's remind the commission of the big picture: 19 terrorists managed to elude our intelligence services, hijack four planes and fly three of them into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon killing almost 2,800 people.

We must remember that in the horror of that day - in which so many people were trying to call for help or one another that cell phone service collapsed - confusion was the order of the day. There seems to be only one true thing about that horrific day: a group of rescuers who knew as little as anyone else about what was going on headed into the inferno to help people they had never met.

Lambasting them or nitpicking employers or a mayor who held the city together by sheer personality is, frankly, sick. The real problem was that no one knew this was coming. We need a commission to find out why that was so.