Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sig who wrote (104707)	7/11/2003 11:48:54 AM
From: LindyBill	Respond to of 281500

We are getting the same kind of one-sided reporting right now in the media about the 911 commission. Here is an article from WSJ.com reviewing what is really going on. 9/11 Mischief A commission turns into an exercise in partisan score-settling. Thursday, July 10, 2003 12:01 a.m. Every American wants to know what went wrong in the lead-up to the 9/11 attacks. So it would be nice to think that the people charged with finding that out were more interested in the task at hand than in politics as usual. That's apparently too much to ask from the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States--better known as the 9/11 Commission. Its first notable business has been to orchestrate a campaign of media leaks and quotes (please dial Senator John McCain for on-the-record outrage) that the Bush Administration is impeding its investigation by, among other crimes, not delivering documents fast enough. A better question is why the Administration is cooperating at all with what looks more and more like a probe with a partisan edge. At last count, the commission has requested millions of pages of documents from 16 government agencies--all of which it apparently wants right now. Even if every one of these pieces of paper landed on the commissioners' desks tomorrow, it's preposterous to think that anyone could actually read and absorb them except at a painstaking pace. In any event, what's the rush? The point of this exercise isn't, or at least shouldn't be, to hang some public servants in the town square as fast as possible. The charge is to discover why terrorists felt the U.S. was vulnerable enough to attack Americans in their very offices. For the purposes of deterring future attacks, the why of the attacks is far more important than the who. The mindset of U.S. policy matters as much as who held it. The evidence on this point won't only be found buried at the CIA but is available in the public record throughout the 1990s. We're prepared to believe that the Bush Administration made mistakes, but on 9/11 it had barely been in office long enough to rearrange the furniture. The commission's passion for documents raises suspicions that it's looking for some "gotcha" memo--a "Dear Condi" e-mail or a "Yours sincerely, Don" letter that would purportedly "prove" that someone was asleep at the switch before September 11, 2001. This suspicion is fueled by the commission's makeup. The Republican chairman, Tom Kean, is an affable former Governor who knows little about foreign policy and defense. His fellow GOP commissioners all have other full-time jobs. The Democrats, meanwhile, include partisans Jamie Gorelick and Richard Ben-Veniste, who'd love to be Attorney General in the next Democratic Administration, perhaps as early as 2005. A third Democrat, Max Cleland, was recently featured in the Washington Post as intensely bitter at the White House over his Senate defeat last year. None of this bodes well for high-minded, dispassionate statesmanship. The commission's final report is due in May, and the not-so-subtle threat in this week's publicity blitz is that the commission might delay releasing its findings until the Presidential campaign is really hot. We have a better idea. If this isn't a partisan exercise, then the commission should agree to take its findings out of campaign politics altogether and report them only after the 2004 election. opinionjournal.com