Tom Kean, the Republican chair of the independent commission on September 11, has publicly threatened to subpoena documents it has requested but not received from the White House and other, unspecified executive departments.
[M]ADISON, 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.
So, let’s review: someone in the White House blew the cover of a long-time CIA operative working in the field—weapons proliferation—the administration claims to be most concerned about, in the regions—South Asia and the Middle East—where the issue is of most importance. Now, the White House and other executive branch departments are stonewalling the 911 commission to such an extent that a life-long GOPer is threatening them with legal action. The CIA is accusing the administration of having leaned on it to produce intelligence aimed at fitting a ready-made conclusion, and Rumsfeld says we have no objective way of measuring our progress in the War on Terror®. The Treasury secretary says we’re adding jobs at less than half the rate he predicted earlier this year, tax revenues are running below expectations, the army is overstressed and fighting an enemy consisting of people we don’t know fighting for reasons we ‘re not clear on.
It is better to look good than to feel good.
