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DLW
Registered Member
Date Joined Apr 2003
Total Posts : 2457
| Posted 10/25/2003 3:31 PM (GMT -6) |   | Administration Faces Supoenas From 9/11 Panel
October 26, 2003
By PHILIP SHENON
MADISON, N.J., Oct. 25 - The chairman of the federal
commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks
says that the White House is continuing to withhold several
highly classified intelligence documents from the panel and
that he is prepared to subpoena the documents if they are
not turned over within weeks.
The chairman, Thomas H. Kean, the former Republican
governor of New Jersey, also said in an interview on Friday
that he believed the bipartisan 10-member commission would
soon be forced to issue subpoenas to other executive branch
agencies because of continuing delays by the Bush
administration in providing documents and other evidence
needed by the panel.
"Any document that has to do with this investigation cannot
be beyond our reach," Mr. Kean said on Friday in his first
explicit public warning to the White House that it risked a
subpoena and a politically damaging courtroom showdown with
the commission over access to the documents, including Oval
Office intelligence reports that reached President Bush's
desk in the weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks.
"I will not stand for it," Mr. Kean said in the interview
in his offices here at Drew University, where he has been
president since 1990.
"That means that we will use every tool at our command to
get hold of every document."
He said that while he had not directly threatened a
subpoena in his recent conversations with the White House
legal counsel, Alberto R. Gonzales, "it's always on the
table, because they know that Congress in their wisdom gave
us the power to subpoena, to use it if necessary."
A White House spokeswoman, Ashley Snee, said that the White
House believed it was being fully cooperative with the
commission, which is known formally as the National
Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States. She
said that it hoped to meet all of the panel's demands for
documents.
Mr. Kean suggested that he understood the concerns of the
White House about the sensitivity of the documents at
issue, saying that they were the sort of Oval Office
intelligence reports that were so sensitive and highly
classified that they had never been provided to Congress or
to other outside investigators.
"These are documents that only two or three people would
normally have access to," he said. "To make those available
to an outside group is something that no other president
has done in our history.
"But I've argued very strongly with the White House that we
are unique, that we are not the Congress, that these
arguments about presidential privilege do not apply in the
case of our commission," he said.
"Anything that has to do with 9/11, we have to see it -
anything. There are a lot of theories about 9/11, and as
long as there is any document out there that bears on any
of those theories, we're going to leave questions
unanswered. And we cannot leave questions unanswered."
While Mr. Kean said he was barred by an agreement with the
White House from describing the Oval Office documents at
issue in any detail - he said the White House was "quite
nervous" about any public hint at their contents - other
commission officials said they included the detailed daily
intelligence reports that were provided to Mr. Bush in the
weeks leading up to Sept. 11. The reports are known within
the White House as the Presidential Daily Briefing.
Despite the threat of a subpoena and his warning of the
possibility of a court battle over the documents, Mr. Kean
said he maintained a good relationship with Mr. Gonzales
and others at the White House, and that he was still
hopeful that the White House would produce all of the
classified material demanded by the panel without a
subpoena.
"We've been very successful in getting a lot of materials
that I don't think anybody has ever seen before," he said
of his earlier dealings with the White House. "Within the
legal constraints that they seem to have, they've been
fully cooperative. But we're not going to be satisfied
until we get every document that we need."
Last year, the White House confirmed news reports that
President Bush received a written intelligence report in
August 2001, the month before the attacks, that Al Qaeda
might try to hijack American passenger planes.
Ms. Snee, the White House spokeswoman, said, "The president
has stated a clear policy of support for the commission's
work and, at the direction of the president, the executive
branch has dedicated tremendous resources to support the
commission, including providing over two million pages of
documents."
After months of stating that it believed subpoenas to the
executive branch would not be necessary, the commission
voted unanimously this month to issue its first subpoena to
the Federal Aviation Administration after determining that
the F.A.A. had withheld dozens of boxes of documents
involving the Sept. 11 attacks.
The subpoena appeared to be a turning point for the
commission and for Mr. Kean, a moderate Republican known
for his independence. In a statement on Oct. 15, the
commission said it was re-examining "its general policy of
relying on document requests rather than subpoenas" as a
result of the issues with the F.A.A.
The commission, which has a membership that is equally
divided among Republicans and Democrats, was created by
Congress last year over the initial opposition of the White
House. The law creating the panel requires that it complete
its work by next May, a deadline that commission members
say may be impossible to meet because of the Bush
administration's delays in turning over many documents.
Mr. Kean's comments on Friday came as another member of the
commission, Max Cleland, the former Democratic senator from
Georgia, became the first panel member to say publicly that
the commission could not complete its work by its May 2004
deadline and the first to accuse the White House of
withholding classified information from the panel for
purely political reasons.
"It's obvious that the White House wants to run out the
clock here," he said in an interview in Washington. "It's
Halloween, and we're still in negotiations with some
assistant White House counsel about getting these documents
- it's disgusting."
He said that the White House and President Bush's
re-election campaign had reason to fear what the commission
was uncovering in its investigation of intelligence and law
enforcement failures before Sept. 11. "As each day goes by,
we learn that this government knew a whole lot more about
these terrorists before Sept. 11 than it has ever
admitted."
Interviews with several other members of the commission
show that Mr. Kean's concerns are widely shared on the
panel, and that the concern is bipartisan.
Slade Gorton, a Republican member of the panel who served
in the Senate from Washington from 1982 to 2000, said that
he was startled by the "indifference" of some executive
branch agencies in making material available to the
commission. "This lack of cooperation, if it extends
anywhere else, is going to make it very difficult" for the
commission to finish its work by next May, he said.
Timothy J. Roemer, president of the Center for National
Policy in Washington and a former Democratic member of the
House from Indiana, said that "our May deadline may, in
fact, be jeopardized - many of us are frustrated that we're
still dealing with questions about document access when we
should be sinking our teeth into hearings and to making
recommendations for the future."
Congress would need to approve an extension if the panel
requested one, a potentially difficult proposition given
the reluctance of the White House and many senior
Republican lawmakers to see the commission created in the
first place.
"If the families of the victims weighed in - and heavily,
as they did before - then we'd have a chance of
succeeding," said Senator John McCain, the Arizona
Republican who was an important sponsor of the legislation
creating the commission. He said that, given the
"obfuscation" of the administration in meeting document
requests, he was ready to pursue an extension "if the
commission feels it can't get its work done."
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/26/national/26KEAN.html?ex=1068132457&ei=1&en=6723de37365f2474
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