Putting aside talk about Iowa, let’s shift attention to the guy the Dem candidates want to replace, and more specifically, Bush’s work with the independent 9/11 Commission.
Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff had a solid story (and good scoop) last week explaining the behind-the-scenes battle going on over the Commission’s calendar.
As Isikoff explained, the panel is facing a May deadline to produce its report on the terrorist attacks of 9/11. The commission’s members, however, don’t feel like they can finish their work by May and want an extension to adequately fulfill their mandate. The White House, of course, doesn’t want to give the panel more time, because then the results of their work may come out at an inopportune time — close to Election Day. As Isikoff noted, “[White House] aides fear that the document will contain fresh ammo for Democrats eager to prove Bush was inattentive to terrorism warnings prior to 9/11.”
In fact, the White House has treated the Commission with contempt, that is, when the administration was acknowledging the panel at all. The White House handpicks which documents the members can see and, even then, panel members cannot even bring their own notes about the documents to their offices for review. The treatement has generated harsh criticism from Commission chair Thomas Kean, a Republican and former governor of New Jersey.
The administration’s tactics are disturbing, to say the least. The 9/11 Commission can’t meet its May deadline in part because the White House has dragged its feet in cooperating with the panel’s requests for information. Now that the Commission’s members have fallen behind, the White House — the cause for the delays — is blocking an extension for fear of political embarrassment.
Keep in mind, the 9/11 Commission isn’t just preparing some turgid book report-like essay on the attacks that’ll end up on some shelf gathering dust. This panel has been charged with the responsibility of determining what led up to the terrorist strikes and creating a plan to help prevent future attacks. Allowing the Commission’s members to take their time and prepare a detailed, comprehensive report is in everyone’s interest.
But everyone’s interests keep bumping into the White House’s political agenda. As Amy Sullivan put it, “The White House is partly to blame for the fact that we don’t yet know what went wrong leading up to the 9/11 attacks and instead of getting to the bottom of the story, they want to postpone findings until after the election because doing otherwise might make things a little dicey for them.” Sounds like an accurate summary to me.
There were some rumors that the White House would approve a delay in the Commission’s deadline, but to December 2004 and no sooner. What a convenient point on the calendar — a month after the election.
It turns out, however, that Bush has decided to oppose any extensions. As the Washington Post reported yesterday, Bush’s decision “virtually guarantees that the panel will have to complete its work by the end of May.”
As a practical matter, the panel’s members, after months of unsuccessful negotiations with the White House for information to which they are entitled, will now have just four months to complete their efforts. This means the Commission will have to “scale back the number and scope of hearings that it will hold for the public,” and will have to rush to complete interviews with as many as 200 remaining witnesses and to finish examining about 2 million pages of documents related to the attacks.
In theory, Congress could offer the Commission an extension on its deadline, but — surprise, surprise — Republicans in the House aren’t going for it. A spokesperson for House Speaker Hastert said he doesn’t “sense a lot of enthusiasm for considering” a delay among lawmakers. What a shock.
This strikes me as the kind of thing Dem presidential candidates should be emphasizing constantly, but so far, as Joe Conason noted yesterday, only Wesley Clark seems willing to call attention to this issue with any consistency.
The sooner the other candidates follow Clark’s lead on this, the quicker the public will learn about the administration’s offensive behavior.