Senator
Lieberman Praises President’s Signing of 9/11 Commission Bill
November
27, 2002
As President Bush signed into law legislation creating a
blue-ribbon commission to investigate the government’s
failures in the months and years leading up to the September
11th attacks, Senate Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman
Joseph Lieberman issued the following statement:
President
Bush’s signing today of the bill creating a non-political
citizens’ commission to investigate the September 11th attacks
is a clear statement of a basic American principle: we must
learn from the past in order to secure a better future.
George
Washington once said we should look back “to derive useful
lessons from past errors, and for the purpose of profiting by
dear-brought experience.” That is the precise mission of this
commission—to better understand what went wrong so we can
prevent such a catastrophic attack from ever happening again.
Senator McCain
and I introduced our bill last December, and as we went forward
we were motivated by the wrenching pleas of the families of
victims of September 11. What
they said was profoundly persuasive. Above and beyond the grief
of their loss, they endured terrible pain because they did not
know the whole story, and feared they might never be able to
tell their children that their government had learned every
possible lesson from its own fatal failures.
It was a tribute to the power of their message that the
commission passed the Senate by a resounding vote of 90-8 on
September 24.
Now, as the bill
becomes law, it’s our shared responsibility to appoint members
with the independence, intellect, and integrity to do the job
right. Henry
Kissinger is an ideal choice to head the commission, and I am
confident he will be surrounded by equally eminent men and
women.
If we do this right, the commission’s full,
fair, and unflinching assessment of what went wrong will be of
immediate value to the new Department of Homeland Security,
which will close the gaps that are uncovered.
And it will be of lasting value to the American people,
who will finally discover the unvarnished truth.
|