Dan Rather A YEAR has come and gone. We have marked Sept. 11, have remembered the attacks, the victims and the day on which our nation was changed in an instant. This is the date we anticipated and dreaded since we first began to emerge from the chaos and confusion of last fall. As we crossed 9/11 off our calendars, we had a sense of having cleared a hurdle, if only an emotional one.
However justified we might be in our relief, the fact is that there are more dates ahead, dates that do not mark past suffering but rather deadlines in our efforts to respond to it.
Two are key to America's ongoing defence against another attack; another is crucial if we are to understand how and why we failed to adequately defend against the first one.
After commercial airliners were used as weapons of mass destruction, many Americans were afraid to fly. The aviation industry, and the nation, faced this crisis along with the surmounting one that September trailed in its wake. Swift action was taken to address this, with Congress mandating changes in airport security. Americans began to take to the air again, slowly. Air travel is not yet where it was before the attacks, but in polls and in conversations, fliers seem to feel safer.
Maybe people feel safer because they think that the big changes have been fully implemented. Not so. The privately employed passenger screeners who proved woefully inadequate to the task are to be replaced with federal screeners; more than 30,000 need to be in place by Nov. 19. With two months to go, the government still needs to employ and train thousands more. At present, only two of the nation's busiest airports are fully staffed by federal screeners.
In worse shape, though, is the programme - again, mandated by law - to screen all checked baggage by the end of the year. Most of the machines that were meant to do this job are not yet available, and, in many cases, airports have not yet made the necessary modifications to accommodate their size. It looks highly unlikely that airports and the Transportation Security Administration will meet the Dec. 31 deadline; if they don't, checked baggage will need to be hand-screened, in response to what aviation experts agree is one of the biggest threats against civil aviation: the possibility that a suicide-bomber will check explosives with his or her bags. Such an arrangement promises to be unwieldy at best, and there are people in the airline industry who think it would result in something resembling bedlam.
A year ago, the country was gripped by a sense of true urgency, a mood reflected in the airport security deadlines. There was also, after an initial period of shock, a real drive to investigate the intelligence lapses that led up to Sept. 11. A joint Congressional Committee set out to do just that. An effort to look into terrorism in the past might not seem as pressing as precautions against future terrorist attacks, but the committee, too, is working on a deadline. Some of its members fear that this Congress will adjourn, sometime in October, before the investigation is complete.
As we move away from Sept. 11, it's natural for Americans to want to exhale - after all, we've made it through that day, with all its visceral impact. But there are other important dates looming on the national horizon - dates that, while less familiar, have their own compelling claims on our attention, and which we may ignore at our own peril.
Dan Rather is a television news anchor. Copyright 2002 DJR Inc. Distributed by King Features Syndicate.
Dan Rather is a television news anchor. Copyright 2002 DJR Inc. Distributed by King Features Syndicate.
