WASHINGTON – New York still has not fixed some of the crucial problems faced by city cops and firefighters on Sept. 11, the commission probing the 2001 terrorist attacks will say this week.

The panel’s final report will rap Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration for failing to delineate more clearly who takes command during catastrophic attacks and for still using radios that prevent police and fire officials from communicating properly, sources said.

“We’re not going to buy the crap that everything was just hunky-dory on (Sept. 11) and that Bloomberg’s fixed it all, and that the incident command formula is just great and they’ve fixed communications,” said one member of the bipartisan commission. “There will be some very straightforward recommendations about the city.”

Officials from the administrations of Bloomberg and ex-Mayor Rudy Giuliani squared off in June when the Sept. 11 commission found it was unclear who commanded first responders at the World Trade Center site before the towers fell.

“You will find that New York City has not gotten off the hook,” said the commissioner, who asked not to be identified.

A Bloomberg spokeswoman said the administration will have no comment until the report is released, which is expected to be Thursday.

The commission will, however, “come down on the side of New York City” and Bloomberg on the issue of federal homeland security funding, which is doled out according to a formula based on population rather than threat. Counterterrorism officials say New York and Washington are at the top of al-Qaida’s hit list.

The bulk of the panel’s report is expected to lambaste federal investigators for failing to share pre-Sept. 11 intelligence that could have unearthed clues about the al-Qaida hijack plot and possibly prevented it, other sources said. A senior U.S. official told the New York Daily News “the CIA takes a pretty heavy hit” and the FBI “takes a few lumps.”

New School President Bob Kerrey, a Democrat on the panel, said the final report was produced unanimously by commissioners who “were selected by the most partisan group (of elected officials) in U.S. history.”

“It’s not “Fahrenheit 9/11,’ but it’s not something the Scaifes (beneficiaries of right-wing billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife) would say is wonderful, either,” Kerrey told The News.

President Bush and former President Clinton are both faulted in the report for failing to nail al-Qaida kingpin Osama Bin Laden before Sept. 11, but by agreement, “we didn’t use partisan language,” Kerrey said.

The commissioners also have found that, almost three years after the attacks, the United States is still struggling to clamp down on terrorist financing.

“We are a lot better at it today than we were even a year ago, but we can only do so much before we run into big-time privacy issues,” the senior U.S. official said.

Iran also is fingered for allowing some of the Sept. 11 hijackers to pass through that country, acting CIA Director John McLaughlin told “Fox News Sunday.”

A core recommendation of the panel already facing opposition from Republicans in Congress and McLaughlin is whether to create a cabinet-level secretary of intelligence to oversee the CIA, military spy agencies, the FBI’s domestic intelligence gathering and a proposed counterterrorism center.

Asked if the CIA would be effective if its chief no longer reported directly to the president, McLaughlin said, “It would be hard to do it without adding an additional layer of bureaucracy.”

The panel will also “take a bite” out of Congress for lax oversight of intelligence, said one commissioner, who added that more power will be recommended for key committees.

Also, the FBI will remain autonomous within the Justice Department, easing agents’ fears that domestic intelligence would be stripped away to form an agency based on Britain’s MI5.

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(New York Daily News correspondent Michael Saul in New York contributed to this report.)

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(c) 2004, New York Daily News.

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AP-NY-07-18-04 2207EDT