Washington: The members of a commission that is investigating the September 11 attacks have said that the US government is not doing enough to protect nuclear weapons from terrorists and its handling of terrorism suspects is undermining America's image in the world.
"Although President George W Bush calls arms proliferation the country's biggest threat and al-Qaeda has sought nuclear weapons for a decade, the most striking thing to us is that the size of the problem still totally dwarfs the policy response," the former commission's chairman Thomas Kean said.
The commission was established by the US Congress to investigate the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon by Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network that killed nearly 3,000 people.
Thomas said that US still does not have maximum effort against the most urgent threat to the American people.
It formally disbanded after submitting its final report in July 2004, but members continue working as the 9/11 Public Discourse Project, which tracks implementation of the report's recommendations.
Monday's report recorded little progress on combating weapons proliferation as well as on US foreign policy and public diplomacy issues.
"This kind of grade unfulfilled, insufficient, minimal progress those grades are failing grades. That is an unacceptable response," Commission member Timothy Roemer said.
The panel attributed the poor results to the difficulty of the tasks and a divided government that is easily distracted even from urgent priorities.
Growing divisions
The 9/11 commission had stressed the need for leaders to work together to protect the country but "if anything, we have become less unified and more partisan," commissioner Jamie Gorelick said.
Although the panel was encouraged by the appointment of Karen Hughes, Bush's close aide, as undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, Vice chairman Lee Hamilton said Muslim world distrust remained high and "detainee abuse in Abu Ghraib (prison in Iraq), Guantanamo and elsewhere undermines America's reputation as a moral leader."
The US was sharply criticised for its handling of detainees after photographs of guards abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq shocked the world.
US forces have held hundreds of detainees at known facilities outside the US, such as Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, since September 11 but senior al-Qaeda leaders have been kept in secret detention facilities overseas.
Meanwhile, Vice President Dick Cheney has spearheaded an effort in Congress to have the CIA exempt from an amendment by Arizona Republican Sen.
Bush threatened to veto the defence bill containing the amendment without the exemption.
Commissioner Richard Ben Veniste strongly endorsed the McCain amendment and said as leaders debate it, "the moral authority of our nation hangs in the balance."
Others on the 10-member commission did not specifically take sides on this politically-charged legislation.
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