Bush Stonewalling on What Bush and Clinton Knew - and When They Knew it - Likely to Fail:
"Some legal experts viewed the decision as an excuse by the White House to conceal information that might be simply embarrassing."
Orin Hatch, Goss, Pelosi... Republicans and Democrats, united in belief that the stonewalling will not last.
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9/11 Panel Asks What Briefers Told Bush
White House Retreats On Independent Probe
washingtonpost.com
By Dana Priest and Dana Milbank
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, September 21, 2002; Page A01
Conspicuously absent from three days of riveting hearings chronicling missed opportunities leading up to the Sept. 11 attacks is what was known about al Qaeda by two key decision-makers: President Bush and his predecessor, Bill Clinton.
The Bush White House says Congress is not entitled to such information. But a growing number of Republicans and Democrats on the joint House-Senate panel investigating the tragedy said this week that if the White House continued its refusal to declassify information on what Bush was told before the attack, they would ask the Senate to take the extraordinary step of overruling Bush's decision to shield the information.
"It's silly and they ought to change their decision," said Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah). "The president is getting poor advice."
Amid a growing cry for fuller disclosure by Bush, the administration offered a concession yesterday by dropping its months-long opposition to an independent commission to probe the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Administration officials said an inquiry should not examine the intelligence failures, a caveat that led some Sept. 11 victims' families to dismiss the move as meaningless. But Democrats on Capitol Hill said the decision to end months of opposition to an independent inquiry made it likely Bush would eventually endorse a probe that included intelligence failures.
A senior administration official did not dispute that view. "It's an independent commission -- they can by definition do what they see fit," said the official.
Over the last several months, the CIA, working with the congressional panel, had expedited the declassification of dozens of intelligence reports and communications related to the Sept. 11 hijackers, the threat from Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda's use of airplanes as weapons. The information is the basis for two reports released this week during the panel's first week of public hearings.
At issue in the dispute between the panel and the White House is whether the panel would be allowed to publicly reveal which of those reports were shared with senior White House officials as well as presidents Bush and Clinton.
That information would show what the presidents knew about threats, how seriously they took them and what they did, in part, to try to thwart al Qaeda.
Since the information that the panel is disputing has been declassified for the panel report, revealing to whom it was distributed in the White House "would not harm national security," staff director Eleanor Hill told the panel Tuesday.
The Bush administration, as the custodian of all White House documents, has authority to deny the release of information concerning President Clinton, White House officials said yesterday.
Releasing the records related to the president, the White House asserted, would inhibit Bush's closest advisers -- and the future advisers of future presidents -- from giving their most candid advice, for fear it might be made public and might be embarrassing. Similar arguments have been used to withhold information from Congress on matters ranging from energy policy to presidential pardons.
"We will not do anything that could prevent presidents from getting precisely the candid intelligence assessments and advice they need," said White House spokesman Sean McCormack.
Some legal experts viewed the decision as an excuse by the White House to conceal information that might be simply embarrassing.
"Their analysis here is weak. This White House releases information about core decisions by the president when it's politically convenient and withholds it when it is not," said Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch. "The president can waive this."
In fact, many members of the panel had believed Bush would release the details in question, given the importance of the issue. It has angered them that he has not.
Refusing to declassify it, "I think it's a stretch," said Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla), chairman of the House intelligence panel. "They are starting out with the idea that the burden is on us to show why it should be declassified. We think the burden should be on them to show why it should not be. . . . Too much stuff is classified that shouldn't be."
Added House Minority Whip Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), the longest sitting member of the House intelligence committee, "This decision is a mistake. I think the American people expect that the president is briefed on intelligence matters."
Congress can appeal through the Freedom of Information Act process, which usually takes years to complete. Or the Senate can vote to declassify the information on its own, which is the route members threatened this week, but that is a cumbersome process and is unlikely to lure enough votes.
Bush has not invoked "executive privilege," a notion derived from the separation of powers in the U.S. Constitution. It protects internal White House discussions and deliberations. The president has not invoked the privilege because no formal request for documents has been made. That is because the panel is already in possession of the documents in question, having culled them from some 400,000 pages made available by the intelligence agencies.
The issue of Bush's knowledge is likely to come up again if there is an even more thorough review of documents by the independent commission.
In a letter to House and Senate leaders, Nicholas E. Calio, Bush's legislative liaison, yesterday offered the administration's "strong support" for a commission, but said it should concentrate on non-intelligence issues, such as border security, visas, commercial aviation, and states and localities. He said the commission could look at "coordination between the intelligence community and non-national security agencies."
Calio confirmed a view floated Wednesday morning in a press briefing by White House press secretary Ari Fleischer who said that Bush was open to an independent probe of "broader issues related to 9/11 separate and apart from intelligence."
Fleischer said yesterday that the new commission "could involve some level of intelligence but not the deep boring in that the intelligence committees did."
Stephen Push, treasurer of the victims' group Families of Sept. 11 and husband of a woman killed on the plane that struck the Pentagon, said Calio's offer was a "crock" and nothing new. "The administration has not come around," he said. "The administration is trying to prevent this commission from doing a thorough investigation of the intelligence failures."
But Democrats applauded the White House concession on a commission because, they said, Bush was moving toward their demands for a broader independent inquiry that studies intelligence matters.
"We appreciate that the White House has switched its position," said Leslie Phillips, spokeswoman for Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.), who has been working for months on the issue. "Intelligence was the core failing leading up to September 11 and that must be investigated by any commission that's established."
House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.) issued a statement saying he was "encouraged" by the letter, and his spokesman, Erik Smith, said the commission "should certainly go further" than Calio outlined.
Rep. Timothy J. Roemer (D-Ind.), who had initiated the call for a commission, welcomed the White House support. "These problems, mistakes and the need for recommended reforms have become so important," he said, after sitting through the first three days of revelations by the joint congressional panel. An independent commission would add "time and expertise" to the work begun by the panel.
Staff writer Christopher Lee contributed to this report.
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