Senate Approves Investigation of 9/11
By Marty Toohey
WASHINGTON, Sept. 24, 2002–The U.S. Senate gave its approval to one of Sen. Joe Lieberman’s homeland security amendments on Tuesday, voting to create an independent 10-person commission to examine the events leading up to the Sept. 11 attacks.
The amendment, co-sponsored by Lieberman (D-Conn.) and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), had almost no opposition heading into the vote.
The White House initially opposed creating the commission, but reversed its position last week after taking criticism.
“The overriding purpose of this inquiry must be a learning exercise, to understand what happened without political interference or reconceptions about the ultimate findings,” Lieberman said.
Lieberman’s staff compared the commission to ones established after Pearl Harbor, the death of President John F. Kennedy, and the Challenger explosion.
The commission would file its initial report within six months, and its final report and recommendations on how to prevent future attacks within a year.
The Senate approved the amendment, 90-8, with Minority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) voting against it.
The House approved a counterpart measure in July that would limit the range of the commission’s inquiry to intelligence issues. The Senate version would also grant authority to examine law enforcement, diplomacy, border controls, immigration and the role of commercial airlines.
House and Senate conferees must resolve the differences between the two versions and reconcile different versions of the homeland security bill to which the amendment was attached before President Bush can sign it into law.
Earlier in the day, Lieberman won another small victory as the Senate defeated, by a 70-28 vote, an amendment by Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W. Va.) that would have required Bush to gain additional congressional approval three times over 13 months before the department became a full cabinet agency.
Lieberman, an opponent of Byrd’s amendment, said it would unnecessarily delay creation of the department.
Negotiators are still working to resolve the issue of workers’ rights within the new department. Bush has threatened to veto the Democrats’ version of the bill because, he says, it limits his flexibility in hiring, firing and re-assigning employees within the department. Democrats say granting the president the extra authority would contradict civil rights agreements for federal employees that have been in place since the 1950s.
Published in The New Britain Herald, in Connecticut.
