posted on July 10, 2003 08:40:27 AM new
WASHINGTON - A long-awaited final report on the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks will be released in the next two weeks, containing new information about U.S. government mistakes and Saudi financing of terrorists.
Former Rep. Tim Roemer, who served on the House Intelligence Committee and who has read the report, said it will be ''highly explosive'' when it becomes public.
The staff director for the congressional investigation that produced the 800-page report, Eleanor Hill, said Wednesday that several lengthy battles with the Bush administration over how much secret data to declassify have been resolved.
She expects the document to go to the Government Printing Office late this week and then be made public about a week later.
''It's compelling and galvanizing and will refocus the public's attention on Sept. 11,'' predicted Roemer, an Indiana Democrat. ``Certain mistakes, errors and gaps in the system will be made clear.''
Roemer, who is also a member of the independent commission on Sept. 11, would not discuss details of the report. He said he expects the public report to be a compromise between intelligence officials who wanted to hold back data and congressional leaders and staffers who pressed for more disclosure.
A source familiar with the investigation, speaking on condition of anonymity, cited two ''sensitive areas'' of the report that will command public attention:
• More information on ties between the Saudi royal family, government officials and terrorists. The FBI may have mishandled an investigation into how two of the Sept. 11 hijackers received aid from Saudi groups and individuals.
John Lehman, a member of the independent commission, said at a hearing Wednesday: ``There's little doubt that much of the funding of terrorist groups -- whether intentional or unintentional -- is coming from Saudi sources.''
• A coherent narrative of intelligence warnings, some of them ignored or not shared with other agencies, before the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
WARNING IN 2001
The report will show that top Bush administration officials were warned in the summer of 2001 that the al Qaeda terrorist network had plans to hijack aircraft and launch a ``spectacular attack.''
Hill would not discuss details of the report, but said it will contain ''new information'' about revelations made last year, when the joint House-Senate investigation held nine public hearings and 13 closed sessions.
The final report was completed in December. Since then a working group of Bush administration intelligence officials has ''scrubbed'' the report, objecting to additional public disclosures.
PUSH FOR DISCLOSURE
The two chairmen from Florida who oversaw the investigation, Sen. Bob Graham and Rep. Porter Goss of Sanibel, have pushed for months for more disclosure.
Graham, a Democrat running for president, has said the administration was using the excuse of national security to block ''embarrassments'' by the government.
Goss blamed the declassification battle on traditional resistance from intelligence officials.
The report will contain chunks of missing type or ''redactions'' to show where information was withheld, Hill said.
Roemer called the report a ``well-written narrative that will be summer reading for adults the way Harry Potter is for kids.''
WIDER PROBE
The 10 members of the independent National Commission on Terrorist Attacks and its staff have had the report for several months and are using it in their more wide-ranging investigation.
The congressional investigation focused on intelligence before and after Sept. 11, while the independent commission's broad mandate includes immigration, airline safety and congressional oversight of counterterrorism.
The commission's two leaders, Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton, complained this week that federal departments were slow in turning over documents needed for their investigation.
posted on July 10, 2003 09:40:32 AM new
that Bob Graham is just a pinko lefty demoKrat trying to be President, what would you expect him to say? It'll be nothing but anti-American lies.You'll see, Ann Coulter will rip it apart and tell us the real truth.
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What luck for the leaders that men do not think. - Adolph Hitler
posted on July 10, 2003 11:48:37 AM new
Prof, welcome to the RIGHT side.
9/11 Mischief A commission turns into an exercise in partisan score-settling.
Thursday, July 10, 2003 12:01 a.m.
Every American wants to know what went wrong in the lead-up to the 9/11 attacks. So it would be nice to think that the people charged with finding that out were more interested in the task at hand than in politics as usual.
That's apparently too much to ask from the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States--better known as the
9/11 Commission. Its first notable business has been to orchestrate a campaign of media leaks and quotes (please dial Senator John McCain for on-the-record outrage) that the Bush Administration is impeding its investigation by, among other crimes, not delivering documents fast enough.
A better question is why the Administration is cooperating at all with what looks more and more like a probe with a partisan edge. At last count, the commission has requested millions of pages of documents from 16 government agencies--all of which it apparently wants right now.
Even if every one of these pieces of paper landed on the commissioners' desks tomorrow, it's preposterous to think that anyone could actually read and absorb them except at a painstaking pace. In any event, what's the rush? The point of this exercise isn't, or at least shouldn't be, to hang some public servants in the town square as fast as possible.
The charge is to discover why terrorists felt the U.S. was vulnerable enough to attack Americans in their very offices. For the purposes of deterring future attacks, the why of the attacks is far more important than the who. The mindset of U.S. policy matters as much as who held it. The evidence on this point won't only be found buried at the CIA but is available in the public record throughout the 1990s.
We're prepared to believe that the Bush Administration made mistakes, but on 9/11 it had barely been in office long enough to rearrange the furniture. The commission's passion for documents raises suspicions that it's looking for some "gotcha" memo--a "Dear Condi" e-mail or a "Yours sincerely, Don" letter that would purportedly "prove" that someone was asleep at the switch before September 11, 2001.
This suspicion is fueled by the commission's makeup. The Republican chairman, Tom Kean, is an affable former Governor who knows little about foreign policy and defense. His fellow GOP commissioners all have other full-time jobs.
The Democrats, meanwhile, include partisans Jamie Gorelick and Richard Ben-Veniste, who'd love to be Attorney General in the next Democratic Administration, perhaps as early as 2005. A third Democrat, Max Cleland, was recently featured in the Washington Post as intensely bitter at the White House over his Senate defeat last year. None of this bodes well for high-minded, dispassionate statesmanship.
The commission's final report is due in May, and the not-so-subtle threat in this week's publicity blitz is that the commission might delay releasing its findings until the Presidential campaign is really hot. We have a better idea. If this isn't a partisan exercise, then the commission should agree to take its findings out of campaign politics altogether and report them only after the 2004 election
posted on July 10, 2003 12:15:23 PM new
Well, as George says, "the past is over". Now that you've outed yourself in bear territory there's nothing that I can do .......but LOL!
"This is still a dangerous world. It's a world of madmen and uncertainty and potential mental losses." George W. Bush
I think that "highly explosive" is just a lot of hype --- to make sure that real findings will seem insignificant in comparison to the expected hype of "explosive".
posted on July 10, 2003 01:06:27 PM new
It'll be interesting to see how it gets spun, or supressed. Anyone want to predict at what point this will all become a snowball too big to stop? It's going to be fun to watch
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What luck for the leaders that men do not think. - Adolph Hitler
posted on July 10, 2003 02:09:27 PM new
Kenneth Star was also "independent", so was the group who investigated the Kennedy killing, and the Waco embarrasment
The administration will respond and over respond until the public is hearing more from them than from this commission. The polls over the last year show us clearly that lies repeated often enough are eventually believed. The mainstream media will help the administration out, at least until they smell blood, and THEN it will get interesting.
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What luck for the leaders that men do not think. - Adolph Hitler
helen