Apparently on an unstoppable roll, the Bush Administration has irked yet another Republican.
Eleven months after the president was dragged kicking and kvetching into signing the bill which established the
National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, the White House is still denying access to documents commissioners believe are necessary for them to accomplish their investigatory mission.
The New York Times reports:
Administration Faces Su[b]poenas From 9/11 Panel
The chairman of the federal commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks said that the White House was continuing to withhold several highly classified intelligence documents from the panel and that he was prepared to subpoena the documents if they were not turned over within weeks.
The chairman, Thomas H. Kean, the former Republican governor of New Jersey, also said in an interview that he believed the bipartisan 10-member commission would soon be forced to issue subpoenas to other executive branch agencies because of continuing delays by the Bush administration in providing documents and other evidence needed by the panel.
"Any document that has to do with this investigation cannot be beyond our reach," Mr. Kean said on Friday in his first explicit public warning to the White House that it risked a subpoena and a politically damaging courtroom showdown with the commission over access to the documents, including Oval Office intelligence reports that reached President Bush's desk in the weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks.
"I will not stand for it," Mr. Kean said in the interview in his offices here at Drew University, where he has been president since 1990.
At a press conference a month ago, co-chair Lee Hamilton warned the White House that if it didn’t cough up the desired documents, the commission would go after them anyway, a clear hint that its subpoena power would be used.
Pressure to authorize the independent commission came about in part because many people weren’t satisfied with the conclusions of the 858-page
Report of the Joint Inquiry into the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001 by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. That inquiry completed its work only six months after the kamikaze hijackers attacked the Pentagon and World Trade Center. But it did so without access to millions of documents that were withheld by the executive branch on grounds of national security. A good deal of the pressure for the new investigation came from families of the victims of the terror attacks.
After a rocky start when its first chief, Henry Kissinger, quit within days of his appointment, the commission settled in for what was planned to be an 18-month-long process.
Foot-dragging - which, along with spinning dross into gloss, is one of the few things this Administration does exceedingly well - began immediately. Out of one side of his mouth, Bush called for an "aggressive" investigation and promised full cooperation.
However, numerous federal agencies withheld documents and made interviews difficult. Anyone the commission interviewed appeared with his or her boss or another member of the agency watching the proceedings. Who could not be reminded of the Iraqi government’s use of official monitors to hang around during interviews of scientists by U.N. weapons inspectors? Such interviews, the Bush Administration loudly and repeatedly declared at the time, proved Saddam Hussein had something to hide.
Kean told a press conference on July 8:
"I think the commission feels unanimously that it’s some intimidation to have somebody sitting behind you all the time who you either work for or works for your agency. You might get less testimony than you would. We would rather interview these people without minders or without agency people there."
He also said then that the commission had met a host of obstacles in getting documents.
Shortly after he made his public pronouncement of mild irritation, the Administration seemingly gave in. More than 10,000 documents were forwarded to the commission, and access to 2 million more was granted. Assistance was obtained in setting up more than 300 interviews.
But when the commission issued its
Second Interim Report on September 23, Kean said at a press conference that commissioners were still having difficulty in obtaining all the documents they sought.
Hamilton was more blunt: "We have laid down a marker here. We need this information in two weeks’ time. We are approaching a crucial point."
Four weeks later, the White House still hasn’t complied. It has sought to allow only Kean and Hamilton to see certain documents, denied commissioners the right to take notes and otherwise continued to engage in what one angry family member of a September 11 victim so aptly characterized as "stonewalling."
Speculation of all kinds has emerged about what might be in those documents, including some wild conspiracy fantasies as well as some postulating which seems not so unimaginable given what this Administration has said and done since September 11. If it had wanted to put these imaginings to rest, the Administration has gone about in the most backward way conceivable.