Bush administration officials, particularly in the wake of Richard Clarke’s revelations, have been insisting that the counterterrorism apparatus they inherited from the Clinton administration was inadequate. Bush, the argument goes, took terrorism seriously, but Clinton didn’t leave him much to work with.
This entire approach has been proven baseless (and, in fact, the opposite of the truth). But if Bush and his cohorts were right, and the Clinton White House hadn’t fully appreciated the threat, it’d be fairly easy to bolster their claims by releasing Clinton-era documents that would presumably be damaging to the former president, right?
Apparently not. Clinton and his former aides want a full release of the relevant documents from their years in the White House but the Bush administration is withholding them from the 9/11 Commission that wants them.
The commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks said on Thursday that it was pressing the White House to explain why the Bush administration had blocked thousands of pages of classified foreign policy and counterterrorism documents from former President Bill Clinton’s White House files from being turned over to the panel’s investigators.
The White House confirmed on Thursday that it had withheld a variety of classified documents from Mr. Clinton’s files that had been gathered by the National Archives over the last two years in response to requests from the commission, which is investigating intelligence and law enforcement failures before the attacks.
Bush aides have said the withheld documents are “duplicative or unrelated,” and therefore don’t need to be shared with commission members. Other documents, they say, are “highly sensitive” and therefore unavailable.
Clinton aides, meanwhile, are insisting that’s not true and that the documents explain in detail the lengths the Clinton administration went to against al Queda. At this point, Bush officials have withheld three-quarters of the 11,000 pages Clinton wants to share with the 9/11 Commission. Clinton aides suspect, understandably, that the decision is politically motivated. The Bush White House wants to keep these documents from the commission so it can place unwarranted blame on Clinton without being proven wrong.
The general counsel of Mr. Clinton’s presidential foundation, Bruce Lindsey, who was his deputy White House counsel, said in an interview that he was concerned that the Bush administration had applied a “very legalistic approach to the documents” and might have blocked the release of material that would be valuable to the commission.
Mr. Lindsey said he first complained to the commission in February after learning from the archives that the Bush administration had withheld so many documents.
“I voiced a concern that the commission was making a judgment on an incomplete record,” he said. “I want to know why there is a 75 percent difference between what we were ready to produce and what was being produced to the commission.”
The Bush White House sure does like to hide important documents, doesn’t it? It’s quite a record they’ve built for themselves. They hide the information they should share — such as the 9/11 docs, records of Cheney’s energy task force, the real cost of the Medicare plan — but share the information they’re supposed to hide — like Valerie Plame’s identity.