Thursday, November 27, 2003

WHAT DID THE PRESIDENT KNOW
AND WHEN DID HE KNOW IT?
The 9/11 Cover-up


From Nation editor David Corn via AlterNet:

The White House had refused to turn over this material to the House and Senate intelligence committees when they were conducting a joint investigation of 9/11, and Bush took the same position with the 9/11 commission. But when the commission – headed by former New Jersey governor Thomas Kean, a moderate Republican appointed to the panel by Bush – raised the prospect of subpoenaing the documents, the Bush team worked out a compromise. It is permitting the 10-member commission limited access to these intelligence reports, known as the President's Daily Brief (PDB). (It helped that family members of people killed on 9/11 had protested the White House's lack of cooperation.) The arrangement was unprecedented; this is the sort of stuff administrations fight to the death to keep secret, but 9/11 is different. Two Democratic commissioners (former Senator Max Cleland and former Representative Timothy Roemer) and the Family Steering Committee, an association of 9/11 relatives blasted the agreement for imposing tight restrictions on how the commission can use information and, most importantly, on what it can tell the public about the material it is allowed to see.

The accord was a partial victory for a Bush White House that has been trying hard to conceal a key slice of the 9/11 tale: what Bush knew of the pre-9/11 intelligence warnings that al Qaeda was planning a strike against the United States, and what Bush did (or did not do) in response to these warnings. The White House's deal with the commission could well enable the administration to maintain this stonewalling.


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