WEEKEND JOURNAL; TV Review: America Unguarded
DON'T BE DAUNTED by the portentous title of the Court TV film "On Native Soil: The Documentary of the 9/11 Commission" (Aug. 21, 10 p.m. to midnight). With some exceptions, particularly its heavy-handed portrayals of some of the bereaved (Susan Rescorla, widow of Rick Rescorla, the heroic Morgan Stanley vice president for security, would certainly have cause for complaint), the documentary succeeds in making sense out of an impossibly complicated network of themes.</br></br>The main one -- the work of the 9/11 Commission -- has, it should be said, been cleaned up significantly. There are no pictures here of the political grandstanding that marred that event, nothing of the semihysterical accusations of former Sen. Bob Kerrey, among others. Though we do get a telling moment in which former Watergate prosecutor Richard Ben-Veniste, in full prosecutorial mode once more, refuses -- as though he were grilling an opponent before a jury -- to allow then National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice to finish her answer. The bullying effort didn't prevent the witness from shutting Mr. Ben- Veniste up long enough to finish her answer -- one of her better public moments.</br></br>It is wonderful, too, to hear former Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta declaiming against failures to strengthen airport security: Norman Mineta, militant foe of any special scrutiny of, say, passengers whose appearance and background fit the known profile of potential hijackers -- i.e., young Middle Eastern males. Especially those with odd omissions in their credentials.</br></br>There's little doubt that Secretary Mineta's high-minded refusal to allow such passengers to be inconvenienced by extra questioning raised fears of giving offense among airport security staffers -- and gave rise to inhibitions that played their part in certain peculiar, and deadly, oversights. One such traveler who arrived at an airport without a photo ID was, as one of the film's commentators acidly points out, nevertheless allowed to proceed. The day was 9/11, that passenger one of the hijackers. Two other hijackers set off metal detectors and were allowed to proceed, without further search.</br></br>Interwoven with the story of the hearings are the memories of survivors and of the bereaved, some of them never before heard, all of them haunting.