I was glad to see that the White House, just 24 hours after being embarrassed by reports of withholding information from the 9/11 Commission, reversed course and announced it would offer the panel broad access. But it doesn’t really resolve the bigger problem with the White House keeping the documents secret in the first place.
The Commission will have the chance to review the records and see if Bush’s aides were intentionally trying to keep pertinent information secret.
The federal panel reviewing the Sept. 11 attacks will determine early next week whether thousands of classified counterterrorism documents from the Clinton administration were unduly held back by President Bush’s aides.
[…]
“Mr. Lindsey voiced a concern. We shared the concern. So they have come up with a way of assuring us that we have access to the materials we need,” [commission spokesman Al] Felzenberg said. “We’ll know quickly if there are materials we should have or if they are duplicates.”
Until then, Mr. Felzenberg said, the commission is withholding judgment as to why some documents weren’t released. “There’s a lot of paper flying around. Let’s see if there’s more to the charge than we know,” he said.
Fine; they’ll take a look and hopefully let us know if they conclude that the Bush White House was trying to cover-up records that might have cast Clinton in a more positive light.
But the question I kept asking myself after reading about this is: What else are they hiding?
The only reason the Bush White House had to reverse course so quickly on this is because they got caught and couldn’t think of a persuasive defense. Clinton’s lawyer, Bruce Lindsey, noticed that documents that were cleared for release were being kept under wraps. This was information the Commission had requested and thought they had received. Lindsey raised a fuss, an article ran in the New York Times, and the White House caved in a hurry. Great.
But if Lindsey hadn’t noticed the discrepancy, it doesn’t look like the Bush administration was anxious to cooperate. It was their intention, obviously, to withhold this information from the Commission. Is it unreasonable, therefore, to ask what else they’ve decided to withhold?
It really makes you wonder why the Bush White House is so insistent on working against the Commission — instead of with it. From the Post’s report:
“We can’t afford to have documents that are relevant to our inquiry being withheld on a technicality,” said Jamie S. Gorelick, a Democratic commission member who served as deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration. “This is not litigation. This is finding facts to help the nation, and we should not treat this as if we’re adversarial parties here.”
This drives the point home perfectly. Bush opposed the existence of the Commission, the White House has resisted cooperating every step of the way, and now they’re withholding records that have been requested and cleared for release.
As Atrios put it:
It’s this basic attitude which should shock and disgust us all. Why is the Bush administration acting like defendants in this?
Once again, Bush is violating the first rule of managing a political controversy: If you don’t have anything to hide, don’t act like you have something to hide.