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9-11 Commissioners: U.S. Safer, But Not by Much

September 11, 2007 5:19 PM

ABC News' Cullen Dirner Reports: On the sixth year anniversary of the September 11th attacks, the co-chairs of the 9-11 Commission said some progress has been made toward making America safer -- but not much.

Watch the video HERE.

"It is our belief that we have made some progress, but we still have a very long way to go," said Thomas Kean, co-chair of the now-disbanded National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States. "It's been difficult, incomplete, and it's been very slow, but real progress had been made." 

Kean and Lee Hamilton, two of ten former 9-11 Commissioners stood independently Tuesday at a news conference to urge the government to implement the last of the 9-11 Commission report suggestions.

They said the U.S. government has failed to adopt 20 percent of the commission's suggestions.

"We do not think that our government has done a good job deciding what it is we need to protect," Hamilton said.  "The list of potential targets is very long. The dollars get spread around to cover them, because no one wants to be wrong."   

Kean and Hamilton said the government hasn't truly begun to think about the repercussions of a weapons of mass destruction attack, such as a nuclear bomb hitting Manhattan.  "It is not the most likely event, but certainly the scariest," Kean said.

The former Commissioners also said the 2008 presidential candidates to speak out more about the importance of national security. 

When asked about Republican presidential candidate Fred Thompson's assertion that bin Laden is more of a "symbol" than anything else, Hamilton agreed, arguing he did not believe bin Laden was the operational head of al Qaeda, but a symbol, a very important symbol.

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