George 'Stonewall' Bush

How do I thwart thee, let me count the ways....

That seems to be the Bush administration's mantra on the 9/11 Commission. After having to be dragged into even allowing a commission to be formed, Bush, his aides and advisers seem to be doing everything they can to slow the Commission down, if not grind it to a halt - or, at the very least - prevent it from being able to come to any kind of meaningful conclusion about what failures happened where and when, and how to prevent them in the future.

This from a President who is running for re-election on the notion that he's somehow committed to battling terrorism and has made the nation "safer." Of course, if either of these contentions were true, he'd want to cooperate fully with ANY investigation that might grant insight into what went wrong and what is needed to really make the country safer, but it's been obvious for quite some time now that Bush has no interest in cooperating.

The most recent stall is actually rather interesting. It seems the commissioners wanted to be able to look at papers from the Clinton era, to see what was known and/or done prior to Bush taking office. There was no objection from the former Clinton administration officials and the papers were forwarded to the White House to present to the commission. The Bush White House, however, decided that most of the papers weren't needed and withheld them from the panel.

The disclosure by the White House on Thursday that it had withheld thousands of classified national-security documents gathered by the National Archives from the files of the Clinton White House drew protests from members of the commission, Democrats and Republicans alike, as well as Congressional Democrats.

Researchers from the National Archives were allowed to use their discretion in culling information from Clinton White House files in response to a series of document requests from the commission, which is investigating intelligence and law-enforcement failures before the Sept. 11 attacks, made over the last year.

But the final decision on whether the documents could be handed over was left to the Bush White House, which decided to block transfer of three-quarters of the nearly 11,000 pages of material, said former Clinton aides who say they were concerned that so many documents had been withheld.

"This is very disturbing," said Richard Ben-Veniste, the former Watergate prosecutor who is a Democratic member of the commission.

The White House said on Thursday that it decided to withhold the Clinton documents because they duplicated other documents, were not relevant to the commission's requests or involved national security and were "highly sensitive."

Mr. Ben-Veniste and other commission members said they were surprised to learn that any Clinton documents had been withheld.

"Since all of the commissioners and most of the staff have security clearances at the very highest level," Mr. Ben-Veniste said, "it puzzles me as to what would be withheld on the basis of national security concerns."

Why on earth would the Bush administration not want the commission to see papers from the Clinton administration? I can't imagine that they'd be wanting to protect Clinton in any way, so are they concerned that whatever is in those papers would somehow reflect badly on Bush? Obviously, we can't know that until or unless someone releases what information is in those documents, but it is kind of strange - especially since the White House has tried to implicate the Clinton administration as being partly to blame for the 9/11 tragedy (which they very well may be - and if they are, we need to know that and how to avoid the mistakes they made, just as we need to know what the Bush people did wrong and how to avoid those mistakes again as well.)

Posted by thorswitch at April 3, 2004 11:50 AM | TrackBack