The 9/11 Commission

[ZippyTheChimp]

March 30, 2004

9/11 Panel Wants Rice Under Oath in Any Testimony

By PHILIP SHENON and RICHARD W. STEVENSON

WASHINGTON, March 29 — The chairman and vice chairman of the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks said on Monday that they would ask Condoleezza Rice to testify under oath in any future questioning because of discrepancies between her statements and those made in sworn testimony by President Bush's former counterterrorism chief.

"I would like to have her testimony under the penalty of perjury," said the commission's chairman, Thomas H. Kean, the former Republican governor of New Jersey, in comments that reflected the panel's exasperation with the White House and Ms. Rice, the president's national security adviser.

Ms. Rice has granted one private interview to the 10-member, bipartisan commission and has requested another. But the White House has cited executive privilege in refusing to allow her to testify before the commission in public or under oath, even as she has granted numerous interviews about its investigation.

The White House declined to respond to Mr. Kean's comments. One official who had been briefed on discussions between the White House and the commission said Monday night that several options were under consideration that might lead to a compromise over Ms. Rice. The official, who asked not to be named because of the delicacy of the negotiations, declined to specify the options and said nothing had yet been decided.

The decision to restrict her availability has led Democrats and other critics to accuse the White House of trying to hide embarrassing information about its failure to pre-empt the Sept. 11 attacks.

"I think she should be under the same penalty as Richard Clarke," Mr. Kean said in an interview, referring to Richard A. Clarke, the former White House counterterrorism adviser who testified to the panel last week that the Bush administration had not paid sufficient attention to the threat from Al Qaeda before Sept. 11, 2001.

Congressional Republican leaders have said Mr. Clarke may have lied under oath in describing the Bush administration's counterterrorism record and requested that previous Congressional testimony by him be declassified.

In a private interview in February with several members of the commission, Ms. Rice was not required to be under oath, and panel officials said no transcript was made of the four-hour conversation. The commission has required all witnesses testifying at public hearings to be sworn in, opening them to perjury charges if they are found to be lying, while all but a handful of the hundreds of witnesses questioned behind closed doors have not been sworn in.

In separate interviews, Mr. Kean and the panel's vice chairman, Lee H. Hamilton, a former Democratic House member from Indiana, said they would continue to press for Ms. Rice to testify under oath in public.

But they said that if the White House continued to refuse to have her answer questions at a public hearing, any new private interviews with Ms. Rice should be conducted under new ground rules, with the national security adviser placed under oath and a transcription made.

Mr. Kean and Mr. Hamilton also said that if the White House agreed, they were ready to declassify and make public the notes taken by commissioners when they interviewed Ms. Rice on Feb. 7, along with the transcripts of nearly 15 hours of private questioning of Mr. Clarke that was conducted by the commission before last week's hearing. "My tendency is to say that everything should be made public," Mr. Kean said.

Throughout the day on Monday, there were signs of a debate within the administration over whether to hold fast to the principle of not allowing White House aides to testify before Congress or to seek a deal that would allow Ms. Rice to appear before the commission.

White House officials said Ms. Rice herself was looking for ways she could be permitted to respond to the commission, despite the reservations of the White House counsel's office and the potential difficulty of explaining why the administration was reversing course on what it had made a matter of principle.

One outside adviser to the White House said Mr. Bush's political staff was inclined to compromise on Ms. Rice's testimony, judging the political costs of continuing to fight in the midst of a tight re-election campaign to outweigh any cost from showing flexibility on the principle.

"It's fair to say many of the senior political advisers understand the principle but have a more pragmatic view," said the adviser, who insisted on anonymity, saying he wanted to keep his role behind the scenes.

This adviser said Karl Rove, Mr. Bush's senior adviser and political strategist, wanted to move the election away from questions like "Were there intelligence failures?" and to put the focus instead on which candidate could better protect against any future efforts by terrorists to attack the United States.

"If we're going to have a discussion about W.M.D. and intelligence failures and Osama bin Laden, that's not an election George W. Bush wins," the adviser said. "If it's about who keeps you safer, that's the ground we want to be on."

The White House has cast its objections to allowing Ms. Rice to make a formal appearance before the commission as a matter of upholding the principle of separation of powers between Congress, which created the commission, and the executive branch.

In a letter to the commission last week, Alberto R. Gonzales, the White House counsel, said that in order to protect the ability of any president "to receive the best and most candid possible advice from their White House staff" on national security issues, it was important that "these advisers not be compelled to testify publicly before Congressional bodies such as the commission."

A second outside adviser said that White House officials believed they could endure the political firestorm raging now but that they were concerned that giving up the privilege could come back to haunt them down the road.

After finding herself at the center of the political furor over Mr. Clarke's testimony, Ms. Rice asked last week for a separate meeting with the commission, specifically to rebut the accusation made by Mr. Clarke in his testimony and in his new, best-selling memoir.

"With other witnesses, our policy has been to conduct interviews under oath when key factual matters are in dispute, and there are obviously some factual matters here under dispute," Mr. Hamilton said. He said the commission would probably go ahead with the interview even if Ms. Rice refused. "If she decided not to be placed under oath, that would be her decision, and we are still going to want her testimony."

The commission has voted in the past against issuing a subpoena for Ms. Rice, and panel members said today that they were unlikely to reconsider given the lengthy court challenge that might result.

Opinion polls over the last week offer no clear signs on whether the furor over Mr. Clarke's accusations will affect Mr. Bush's hopes for re-election.

A poll by the Pew Research Center conducted March 22 through Sunday showed Mr. Bush running even with Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts in a head-to-head match-up among registered voters. A poll by Newsweek taken after Mr. Clark's testimony showed that while the president's overall approval rating remained steady at 49 percent, the percentage of voters who said they approved the way he had handled terrorism and domestic security issues had dropped.

Ms. Rice has given a flurry of interviews to news organizations over the last week in which she has challenged Mr. Clarke's truthfulness, including his depiction of her as slow-footed in responding to intelligence warnings throughout 2001 that Al Qaeda was plotting a catastrophic attack on the United States.

Members of the commission, Democrats and Republicans alike, say they are angered by her interviews. They say the White House has made a major political blunder by continuing to assert executive privilege in blocking public testimony by Ms. Rice while continuing to use her as the principal public spokeswoman in defending the Bush's administration's actions before Sept. 11.

"I find it reprehensible that the White House is making her the fall guy for this legalistic position," said John F. Lehman, Navy secretary in the Reagan administration and a Republican member of the commission. "I've published two books on executive privilege, and I know that executive privilege has to bend to reality."

While there is precedent for the White House argument that incumbent national security advisers and other White House advisers should not be required to testify in public, constitutional scholars say that the position is based only on past practice, not law, and that presidents have repeatedly waived the privilege, especially at times of scandal or other intense political pressure.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Chart: Testimony by National Security Advisers (http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2004/03/30/national/0330PANE_chart.gif)

[Kris]

April 3, 2004

The Mystery Deepens

The Bush administration's handling of the bipartisan commission investigating the 9/11 tragedy grows worse — and more oddly self-destructive — with each passing day. Following its earlier attempts to withhold documents from the panel and then to deny its members vital testimony, we now learn that President Bush's staff has been withholding thousands of pages of Clinton administration papers as well.

Bill Clinton authorized the release of nearly 11,000 pages of files on his administration's antiterrorism efforts for use by the commission. But aides to Mr. Clinton said the White House, which now has control of the papers, vetoed the transfer of over three-quarters of them. The White House held the documents for more than six weeks, apparently without notifying the commission, and might have kept them indefinitely if Bruce Lindsey, the general counsel of Mr. Clinton's presidential foundation, had not publicly complained this week. Yesterday the commission said the White House had agreed to allow its lawyers to review the withheld documents, but without guaranteeing any would be released.

This latest distressing episode followed the White House's pattern of resisting the commission in private and then, once the dispute becomes public, reluctantly giving up the minimum amount of ground. Earlier in the week, Mr. Bush finally agreed to allow Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, to testify under oath — but only after extracting a commitment that the commission would not seek any further public testimony from any White House official. After months of foot-dragging, Mr. Bush also grudgingly agreed to let the panel question him and Vice President Dick Cheney privately. Last year the Pentagon, the Justice Department and other agencies stonewalled the commission's requests for documents until its chairman, Thomas Kean, the former Republican governor of New Jersey, complained publicly.

Explaining the latest act of obstruction, Scott McClellan, the president's spokesman, said on Thursday that some documents were duplicative, unrelated or "highly sensitive." The White House, he said, had given the commission "all the information they need." Mr. Bush's staff should not be making that judgment. The commission's 10 members can be trusted with sensitive material.

Moreover, given the repeated criticism of this administration's obsessive secrecy on other issues, it is astonishing that it would still withhold anything that did not pose an immediate and dire threat to national security. The American people would like to know that they have a government that freely gives information to legitimate investigations on matters of grave national interest, not one that fights each reasonable request until it is exposed and forced to submit. The White House is serving no public purpose by acting less interested than the rest of us in having this commission do its vital work. Its ham-handed behavior is also gravely damaging the entire concept of executive privilege.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[Kris]

April 4, 2004

FRANK RICH

Are You Now or Have You Ever Been in the Situation Room?

In comedy, as in politics, timing is everything. You have to wonder just what George W. Bush was thinking on the night of Wednesday, March 24, when he decided to do stand-up at the end of the most gripping day of 9/11 television since 9/11 itself.

That afternoon had brought Richard Clarke's testimony before the 9/11 commission, a classic piece of Washington committee-room theater. Mr. Clarke's mea culpa — "Your government failed you, those entrusted with protecting you failed you and I failed you" — is likely to join our history's greatest-hits video reel, alongside Joseph Welch's "Have you no sense of decency, sir?," Howard Baker's "What did the president know, and when did he know it?" and Clarence Thomas's "high-tech lynching." That evening, Tom Brokaw, generally the least contentious (and most watched) of the three network anchors, took the startling step of giving Condoleezza Rice the first hard slap of her heretofore charmed life in the public eye: "Dr. Rice, with all due respect, I think a lot of people are watching this tonight, saying: `Well, she can appear on television, write commentary, but she won't appear before the commission under oath. It just doesn't seem to make sense.' " As indeed it did not, to anyone.

Was this the best night for the president to do a comedy routine touching on his administration's failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? Maybe you had to be in the hall — an annual black-tie dinner for broadcast journalists in Washington — as I was not. But as Howard Dean learned in Iowa, it's only how you come across on TV that matters in America, not what it feels like in the moment. On TV, Mr. Bush's jocular slide show, in which he is seen searching for Saddam's arsenal in the Oval Office, proved an unwanted bookend to Mr. Clarke's opening act. A nation of viewers that had watched a public servant mourn the unnecessary loss of American life on 9/11 now saw the president make light of the rationale that necessitated the sacrifice of an additional 500-plus Americans (so far) in the war fought in 9/11's name.

There will be many more such whipsaw days of television to come. This drama has legs. It is hurtling toward September 2004, when Mr. Bush appears at the Republican convention in New York against an implicit, and possibly literal, ground zero backdrop. For reasons that are rarely unselfish, everyone wants to own a piece of 9/11. Whether it's TV ads that invoke the ruins and corpses of the World Trade Center to sell the Bush-Cheney campaign or a short-lived effort by MBNA (coincidentally or not, the biggest Bush contributor in 2000) to market a "Spirit of America" MasterCard picturing the ground zero firemen hoisting the flag, power and money are at stake, not just our security.

The role of television in the fight for ownership of 9/11 is paramount. The medium and its latest star performers — Mr. Clarke, Ms. Rice, the 9/11 commissioners — are driving the show now, often independently of any actual news. If anything, the dirty little secret about the uproar over Mr. Clarke is that his "shocking" revelations had been previously revealed, long before he went on "60 Minutes" or published his book.

It was 27 months ago that Bob Woodward, writing in The Washington Post, first quoted the president as saying that he "didn't feel that sense of urgency" about Osama bin Laden before 9/11. The Bush administration's downsizing, stalling and fumbling of the fight against terrorism in the seven-plus months between Inauguration Day and 9/11 was reported by Time in August 2002. The failure of Ms. Rice to advance Mr. Clarke's Jan. 25, 2001, memo on al Qaeda's urgent threat has been recounted (and sourced) in detail in such best sellers as Steve Coll's "Ghost Wars" and Craig Unger's "House of Bush, House of Saud," both of which beat Mr. Clarke's own account to the stores. (Still to come is a new Woodward best seller about the ramp-up to Iraq, "Plan of Attack," which "60 Minutes" will herald two weeks from tonight and which Rush Limbaugh is already pre-emptively trashing as being from "the same publisher" as the Clarke book.)

But print, even best-selling print, doesn't matter much in the 21st-century American arena. The Bush administration's game was to keep these revelations away from the center stage of wall-to-wall TV coverage. To this end, it succeeded in blocking the formation of the 9/11 commission for a year. Then it threw every conceivable roadblock in its path, from Henry Kissinger (the original appointee as chairman) to delays in providing documents and testimony. That the investigation got going anyway is a tribute not to Mr. Clarke, the Democrats or any journalist but to the telegenic clout of the 9/11 families. Like all victims of horrific crimes, they are sought after as television "gets" in a culture that likes up-close-and-personal TV replays of tragedies. The 9/11 families used their many on-air minutes to keep pushing for a commission until the White House had to cry uncle.

The families remain crucial TV players in the story. Their applause when a sharp Clarke riposte one-upped a Republican interrogator, the supercilious former Illinois governor James Thompson, played mightily on screen, as did their tearful embraces of Mr. Clarke after his testimony. Mr. Clarke, who has spent his entire career in the shadowy bowels of the Washington bureaucracy, has also proved to be a natural before the camera. With his sonorous voice, secret-agent aura and vaguely intimidating body language, he's as commanding in his weird way as Orson Welles in full noir. His menacing stare in response to another antagonistic interrogator on the 9/11 commission, John Lehman, seemed to brush back Mr. Lehman much as Mr. Clarke's verbal darts drove Mr. Thompson from the hearing room altogether. Four days later came the pièce de résistance on "Meet the Press," where Mr. Clarke pulled a rabbit out of a hat in the form of an adulatory handwritten note from President Bush. This move not only checkmated the administration's efforts to belittle Mr. Clarke's government service but did so with a subliminal visual echo of Tim Russert's most iconic TV image, his brandishing of his handwritten slate of electoral vote calculations on election night, 2000.

The White House, so often masterly in its TV management, particularly where 9/11 is concerned, has been wildly off its game. First, the White House press secretary said that Mr. Bush was too busy to watch the hearings — always a bad idea in a country of TV addicts. Soon administration emissaries went on full-court press to chastise Mr. Clarke for promoting a self-serving book at the height of election season. The only problem with that strategy is that one of its creators, Mr. Bush's once and future communications czar, Karen Hughes, was just days from starting her current nonstop TV tour to hype her own self-serving book about her White House tenure (9/11 included). Bill Frist, the Senate majority leader, went even further, attacking Mr. Clarke's book as an attempt to profiteer on his inside access and "highly classified information." Apparently Mr. Frist did not know that the White House itself had vetted Mr. Clarke's book for possible security transgressions and approved it. Nor did the senator seem to remember that he had written his own, far cheesier post-9/11 cash-in book, "When Every Moment Counts: What You Need to Know About Bioterrorism from the Senate's Only Doctor." (I know it sounds like a parody, but that's the real title.)

Someone should get poor Ms. Rice a book contract just to keep her off the air. She's been the wackiest serial TV guest since Monica Lewinsky's lawyer, William Ginsburg, turning up everywhere except "Hollywood Squares" to insist that she would really, truly love to testify before the 9/11 commission but wouldn't — except in private. It was easy to see why she held to this doomed strategy for so long. From day to day, her changing recollection of what Mr. Bush did or didn't say about Iraq to Mr. Clarke in the Situation Room on 9/12 had been harder to track than Colonel Mustard's perambulations in the billiard room in a protracted game of Clue. Now that she has bowed to the inevitable and will testify in public under oath after all, she had better resolve all her contradictory statements pronto, lest Senator Frist unleash the same reckless insinuations of perjury that he had leveled at Mr. Clarke.

Democrats who are enjoying this all a bit too much should remember that their own favorite, John Kerry, is a terrible TV actor in his own right. Just as the Clarke juggernaut was about to mercifully wipe him off the screen, the Massachusetts senator was skiing in the ostentatiously tony precincts of Ketchum, Idaho, and making on-camera pronouncements about Iraq like "I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it." For the moment, he has escaped with minor damage, if only because 9/11 trumps all other discourse. Mr. Kerry's best hope is that Mr. Bush, in his zeal to protect his ownership of that day, the most saleable commodity of his presidency, will keep the Clarke story alive indefinitely on television, as, so far, he seems determined to do.

But neither Mr. Bush nor Mr. Kerry is in command. As the families will continue to fight for their ownership of 9/11, so will forces beyond anyone's control. Like all gripping dramas, this one has a subtext, and the subtext in this case is fear. Last Sunday on "60 Minutes" Ed Bradley dipped a toe into it by noting that there were fewer attacks in the 30-month period leading up to 9/11 than there have been in "the 30 months afterward when you had this war against it." Ms. Rice was dismissive of his logic. "Ed, I think that's the wrong way to look at it," she said. But that's the way many, if not most, in America do look at it. For all the sturm and drang we've watched in Washington since Richard Clarke went on "60 Minutes" two weeks ago, nothing has happened yet to dispel our underlying terror that the real owner of 9/11 is still al Qaeda.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[ZippyTheChimp]

April 9, 2004

NEWS ANALYSIS

In Testimony to 9/11 Panel, Rice Sticks to the Script

By DAVID E. SANGER

WASHINGTON, April 8 — When Condoleezza Rice took the national stage on Thursday morning, her task was to defend President Bush against the accusation that he was inattentive to terrorism before the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, and to defuse a debate that threatens his re-election campaign. She mounted the defense vigorously, but in the hours after she returned to the White House, it was evident that she had not defused the arguments.

At every turn in her three hours of often-contentious testimony, she stuck to the White House script: Everything that could have been done to prevent the attacks had been done. She did not acknowledge failings, apart from the institutional tensions that have long plagued the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and a culture that made it impossible for a succession of administrations to see the threat unfolding in front of them.

She also did not concede that the newly arrived Bush administration was part of that problem, or that it, too, underestimated what it confronted or was distracted by other issues like tax cuts, China and missile defense. Moreover, her tone — as controlled as her delivery at one of her Stanford seminars — left many panel members wondering if she was defending a position that several of them have publicly said is indefensible.

For viewers who have not been following the details of the argument, there was the lingering question of whether anyone in the Bush White House is capable of admitting error — a step many of Ms. Rice's current and former colleagues said would help calm the political waters.

"If Dr. Rice wanted to change some minds, she needed to come out and admit that the administration — like so many of its predecessors — had made mistakes in addressing international terrorism," said Ken Pollack, a former analyst at the national security council and C.I.A. and now a scholar at the Saban Center at the Brookings Institution. "Simply denying that this administration has underestimated the threat is unlikely to convince Americans who see the manifest failures of the United States government to address a systemic problem."

As expected, Ms. Rice was polite, brisk and precise, if a bit apprehensive-sounding at the start. But by the end of the three hours, her tone was so emphatic and unemotional that she may have created as many new debates about the administration's reaction as she settled old ones.

"This isn't over," one senior administration official said after watching her. "But we may have turned a corner."

Yet on Thursday evening, the White House was still trying to substantiate Ms. Rice's argument earlier in the day that an Aug. 6 intelligence briefing prepared for Mr. Bush about the deadly mix of Qaeda terrorists and airplanes contained nothing about "time, place, how or where" that the president could have acted upon. It was a sign of the political pressure on the White House, however, that at Mr. Bush's orders lawyers were finally racing to declassify the document, which they have kept out of view for more than two years.

Ms. Rice's strongest moments came when she made the case that a month and a half after settling into her office, she started developing a comprehensive — if long-range — strategy to upend Al Qaeda. She argued that the man who has been her harshest critic, Richard A. Clarke, had not left her with a plan, but rather a series of steps to lash out at Al Qaeda. She said that "we might have gone off-course" if the administration had pursued the group without trying to line up Pakistan and other key players.

Hiding the anger at Mr. Clarke that she has vented to friends, she praised him highly in public, and then said she had turned over responsibility for designing the administration's strategy to him. "He was to put that strategy together," she said, essentially putting the failures back in his lap.

But on the other major subject of the hearings — her response to the threats in the summer of 2001 — she was far less persuasive.

In one tangle after another with members of the commission, she did not put to rest questions about why the administration had not taken stronger action after learning of evidence that not only was Al Qaeda intent on striking the United States, but also that airplanes could somehow figure in the attack. She argued, for example, that the F.B.I. was conducting "70 full-field investigations" of Qaeda cells in the United States. Counterterrorism officials said on Thursday that the number overstated the intensity of their search, opening up a new line of inquiry even as Ms. Rice closed off others.

And then there was Ms. Rice's statement on Thursday morning: "There was nothing demonstrating or showing that something was coming in the United States. If there had been something, we would have acted on it."

Yet the declassified version of the joint Congressional inquiry into the warnings that preceded the attacks determined that in May 2001, "the intelligence community obtained a report that bin Laden supporters were planning to infiltrate the Untied States by way of Canada to carry out a terrorist operation using high explosives. This report mentioned without specifics an attack within the United States." That information was "included in an intelligence report for senior government officials in August," it concludes.

That is just one example of how many disparities remain between the administration's account of what it knew in 2001 and what its critics said it should have pieced together. Ms. Rice kept arguing there was no "silver bullet." Several commission members, led by Richard Ben-Veniste, a Democrat best known for his role as a Watergate prosecutor, suggested that there were plenty of bullet fragments, and that the administration failed to put them together.

Addressing Ms. Rice with a tone of impatience that she rarely hears in the quiet halls of the West Wing, he demanded that she reveal to the world the title of that Aug. 6 briefing.

"I believe the title was `Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States,' " she said, immediately trying to explain that it was a historical document, not one containing an explicit warning. "I would like to finish my point here," she said as Mr. Ben-Veniste interrupted.

Mr. Ben-Veniste shot back, "I didn't know that there was a point."

The subtext of such angry exchanges was that Ms. Rice, while seeking to defuse criticism, was in no mood to move to a middle ground. There is too much at stake — starting with the president's reputation as the world's No. 1 warrior against terror, before and after Sept. 11.

But in the end, Ms. Rice's most effective argument may have been her acknowledgment that the country did not have the political will to organize against terrorism until blood was shed on American soil.

"The restructuring of the F.B.I. was not going to be done in the 233 days in which we were in office," she said. Nor, she said, was the country about to make its aircraft cockpits more secure, or threaten to invade Afghanistan, or conduct any other kind of preemptive military strike in the name of counterterrorism.

It was that way before World War I, she argued with the air of the academic she once was. It was that way before Pearl Harbor.

"And tragically," she told the commission, "for all the language of war spoken before Sept. 11, this country simply was not on a war footing."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[NYatKNIGHT]

Dick Clarke was right, there wasn't urgency.

[TomAuch]

I've been getting more and more suspicious about the way Bush acted leading up to 9/11. I know most Republicans don't know or don't want to know this, but Bush called off the investigation into the Cole Bombing, and tried cutting FBI terror funding pre-9/11 AND post-9/11. The first attempted cut was to reappropriate money into Star Wars, while the second cut was a slashing of emergancy post-9/11 money needed to help the FBI. 2/3rds of the FBI's requested budget was cut, and among those things were new computers and translators.
Also, Bush was given that 8/6 memo, so he had to have known there was going to be an attack on 9/11 WITH airplanes...although I'm not sure if he knew where they'd even hit. Why he didn't act is beyond me though.

[BigMac]

Downtown Express
April 9, 2004

EDITORIAL

Cooperation with 9/11 Commission will make us safer

The testimony of National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice before the 9/11 Commission in public and under oath on Thursday shows once again how enormously valuable this commission is. Not that we were pleased by her testimony – we weren’t. But we need to see the leaders in both the Bush and Clinton administrations face tough questions from the experienced public servants on the commission so that the panel can determine and help us understand to what extent, if any, the Sept. 11 attacks were preventable and much more importantly, to figure out what can we do to reduce the chances of future terrorist acts. Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, the leaders of the commission, and the rest of their colleagues appear more focused on correcting problems than playing a blame game.

Like many family members of 9/11 victims, we would like to see more cooperation and honesty from the Bush administration on matters before the commission. We understand the perils of the commission working in an election year, but surely Bush could admit that with the benefit of hindsight, he would have devoted more time and resources to stopping Al Qaeda. Such an admission would not only be refreshing for many to hear, it would be an important step for the administration to take before it could work with the commission on fixing what went wrong.

This admission would not mean Bush is responsible for 9/11. Osama bin Laden is. What does appear to be the case is that there were loose pieces of information floating around the F.B.I. and C.I.A., and if there was better internal and inter-agency communication and more of a focus against Al Qaeda, perhaps the attack might have been able to be prevented. In all likelihood, we’ll never know.

Bush made mistakes but so did Clinton and both deserve some understanding from the public that we were all living in a pre-9/11 world before Sept. 11, 2001.

Our neighborhood in Lower Manhattan was attacked in 1993 and the response was not strong enough. The terrorists came back eight years later and proved that they learned how to take the Twin Towers down and kill thousands of people. In between, U.S. embassies were bombed in Africa, the Cole was attacked and still we didn’t realize we were at war.

Bush came in, focused on theoretical ways to stop an errant nuclear missile and on withdrawing from the A.B.M. Treaty, and the most severe threat was put on the backburner.

That’s what Richard Clarke, former White House anti-terrorism chief, argues with considerable credibility. Clarke, a non-partisan who has worked for both President Bushes, President Clinton and President Reagan, has been viciously attacked by the current administration, which can’t seem to get their story straight as to whether Clarke was out of the loop or the man to blame for 9/11.

Why does Clarke have credibility? Bush admitted to Bob Woodward that he didn’t have the sense of urgency about getting bin Laden pre-9/11. Few of us did. The administration would have been better to stick to that point than to pretend that terrorism was the top priority at the beginning of 2001. Clarke’s second major point, that the administration was obsessed with Iraq, was confirmed by Paul O’Neill, Bush’s former Treasury secretary, and borne out by Bush’s reckless and disastrous actions in Iraq.

The war against Iraq, in addition to the rapidly increasing costs in human lives, resources, and U.S. standing and credibility in the world, took the focus away from bin Laden, who still remains at large. Capturing or killing him won’t end the terrorist threat, just as capturing Hussein did not end the threat against U.S. forces in Iraq, but it should reduce it and regardless, it is essential that bin Laden be brought to justice.

Admitting we could have and should have done better three, four or 11 years ago won’t make us safer, but it will help set the stage for implementing anti-terrorism reforms. For those of us who live and work in Lower Manhattan, this is not an idle abstraction.

Copyright 2004 Community Media LLC

[BigMac]

New York Times
April 10, 2004

Bush Was Warned of Possible Attack in U.S., Official Says

By ERIC LICHTBLAU and DAVID E. SANGER

http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2004/04/10/politics/10pane.583.jpg
Condoleezza Rice went before the Sept. 11 commission on Thursday. Members include Jamie S. Gorelick, left, and Thomas H. Kean, right.

President Bush was told more than a month before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, that supporters of Osama bin Laden planned an attack within the United States with explosives and wanted to hijack airplanes, a government official said Friday.

The warning came in a secret briefing that Mr. Bush received at his ranch in Crawford, Tex., on Aug. 6, 2001. A report by a joint Congressional committee last year alluded to a "closely held intelligence report" that month about the threat of an attack by Al Qaeda, and the official confirmed an account by The Associated Press on Friday saying that the report was in fact part of the president's briefing in Crawford.

The disclosure appears to contradict the White House's repeated assertions that the briefing the president received about the Qaeda threat was "historical" in nature and that the White House had little reason to suspect a Qaeda attack within American borders.

Members of the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks have asked the White House to make the Aug. 6 briefing memorandum public. The A.P. account of it was attributed to "several people who have seen the memo." The White House has said that nothing in it pointed specifically to the kind of attacks that actually took place a month later.

The Congressional report last year, citing efforts by Al Qaeda operatives beginning in 1997 to attack American soil, said that operatives appeared to have a support structure in the United States and that intelligence officials had "uncorroborated information" that Mr. bin Laden "wanted to hijack airplanes" to gain the release of imprisoned extremists. It also said that intelligence officials received information in May 2001, three months earlier, that indicated "a group of bin Laden supporters was planning attacks in the United States with explosives."

Also on Friday, the White House offered evidence that the Federal Bureau of Investigation received instructions more than two months before the Sept. 11 attacks to increase its scrutiny of terrorist suspects inside the United States. But it is unclear what action, if any, the bureau took in response.

The disclosure appeared to signal an effort by the White House to distance itself from the F.B.I. in the debate over whether the Bush administration did enough in the summer of 2001 to deter a possible terrorist attack in the United States in the face of increased warnings.

A classified memorandum, sent around July 4, 2001, to Condoleezza Rice, the president's national security adviser, from the counterterrorism group run by Richard A. Clarke, described a series of steps it said the White House had taken to put the nation on heightened terrorist alert. Among the steps, the memorandum said, "all 56 F.B.I. field offices were also tasked in late June to go to increased surveillance and contact with informants related to known or suspected terrorists in the United States."

Parts of the White House memorandum were provided to The New York Times on Friday by a White House official seeking to bolster the public account provided a day before by Ms. Rice, who portrayed an administration aggressively working to deter a domestic terror attack.

But law enforcement officials said Friday that they believed that Ms. Rice's testimony before the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks — including her account of scores of F.B.I. investigations under way that summer into suspected Qaeda cells operating in the United States — overstated the scope, thrust and intensity of activities by the F.B.I. within American borders.

Agents at that time were focused mainly on the threat of overseas attacks, law enforcement officials said. The F.B.I. was investigating numerous cases that involved international terrorism and may have had tangential connections to Al Qaeda, but one official said that despite Ms. Rice's account, the investigations were focused more overseas and "were not sleeper cell investigations."

The finger-pointing will probably increase next week when numerous current and former senior law enforcement officials, including Attorney General John Ashcroft, testify before the Sept. 11 commission. In an unusual pre-emptive strike, Mr. Ashcroft's chief spokesman on Friday accused some Democrats on the commission of having "political axes to grind" in attacking the attorney general, who oversees the F.B.I., and unfairly blaming him for law enforcement failures.

A similar accusation against the commission was also leveled by Senator Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican with ties to the White House, in a speech on the Senate floor Thursday.

"Sadly, the commission's public hearings have allowed those with political axes to grind, like Richard Clarke, to play shamelessly to the partisan gallery of liberal special interests seeking to bring down the president," Mr. McConnell said.

The charges and countercharges underscored the political challenge that the investigation into the Sept. 11 attacks has become for President Bush as he mounts his re-election bid. The White House sought this week to defuse the situation by allowing Ms. Rice to testify before the Sept. 11 commission after months of resistance. But her appearance served to raise new questions about the administration's efforts to deter an attack.

The White House on Friday put off a decision on declassifying the document at the center of the debate — the Aug. 6 briefing, titled "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States." But the administration appeared ready to release at least portions of the document publicly in the coming days.

The memo from Mr. Clarke's group in July 2001 about F.B.I. activities adds another piece of evidence to the document trail, but it is unlikely to resolve the questions over whether the administration did enough to deter an attack.

White House officials, who spent several weeks attacking Mr. Clarke's credibility, said Friday that they believed the memo from his counterterrorism group was an accurate reflection of steps the White House took to deter an attack. But they questioned whether the F.B.I. executed the instructions to intensify its scrutiny of terrorist suspects and contacts in the United States.

In April 2001, the F.B.I. did send out a classified memo to its field offices directing agents to "check with their sources on any information they had relative to terrorism," said a senior law enforcement official who spoke on condition of anonymity. But with the level of threat warnings increasing markedly over the next several months, there is no indication that any directive went out in the late June period that was described in the memo from Mr. Clarke's office.

That summer saw a string of alerts by the F.B.I. and other government agencies about the heightened possibility of a terrorist attack, but most counterterrorism officials believed an attack would come in Saudi Arabia, Israel or elsewhere. Many also were worried about a July 4 attack and were relieved when that date passed uneventfully.

For months, the F.B.I. had been consumed by internal problems of its own, including the arrest of an agent, Robert P. Hanssen, on espionage charges, the disappearance of documents in the Oklahoma City bombing case and the fallout over the Wen Ho Lee spy case. Moreover, the bureau was going through a transition in leadership, with its longtime director, Louis J. Freeh, retiring in June 2001. He was replaced by an acting director, Thomas J. Pickard, until the current director, Robert S. Mueller III, took over in September, just days before the deadly hijackings. All three men will testify at next week's commission hearings and are expected to face sharp questioning about whether the F.B.I. did enough to prevent an attack in the weeks and months before Sept. 11.

At this week's appearance by Ms. Rice, several commissioners sharply questioned whether the F.B.I. and the Justice Department had done enough to act on intelligence warnings about an attack.

"We have done thousands of interviews here at the 9/11 commission," said Timothy J. Roemer, a Democratic member of the panel. "We have gone through literally millions of pieces of paper. To date, we have found nobody — nobody at the F.B.I. who knows anything about a tasking of field offices" to identify the domestic threat.

The apparent miscommunication will probably be a central focus of the commission's hearing next week. Scrutiny is expected to focus in part on communication breakdowns between the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. that allowed two of the 19 hijackers to live openly in San Diego despite intelligence about their terrorist ties.

Another Democratic panel member, Jamie S. Gorelick, said at Thursday's hearing that Mr. Ashcroft was briefed in the summer of 2001 about terrorist threats "but there is no evidence of any activity by him."

Such criticism led Mark Corallo, Mr. Ashcroft's chief spokesman at the Justice Department, to say Friday that "some people on the commission are seeking to score political points" by unfairly attacking Mr. Ashcroft's actions before Sept. 11.

"Some have political axes to grind" against Mr. Ashcroft, Mr. Corallo said in an interview, naming Ms. Gorelick, who was the deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration; Mr. Roemer, a former congressman from Indiana, and Richard Ben-Veniste, the former Watergate prosecutor.

While insisting that he was not speaking personally for Mr. Ashcroft, Mr. Corallo said he was offended by Ms. Gorelick's remarks in particular. Offering a detailed preview of Mr. Ashcroft's testimony next week, he said the attorney general was briefed repeatedly by the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. on threats posed by Al Qaeda and was told that the threats were directed at targets overseas. "He was not briefed that there was any threat to the United States," Mr. Corallo said. "He kept asking if there was any action he needed to take, and he was constantly told no, you're doing everything you need to do."

Several commission officials denied in interviews that there was any attempt to treat Mr. Ashcroft unfairly. Al Felzenberg, a spokesman for panel, said that Mr. Ashcroft would be warmly received.

Ms. Gorelick said she was surprised by Mr. Corallo's comments and puzzled by assertions that the attorney general had no knowledge of a domestic terrorist threat in 2001.

"This appears to be a debate within the administration," she said. "On the one hand, you have Dr. Rice saying that the domestic threat was being handled by the Justice Department and F.B.I., and on the other hand, you have the Justice Department saying that there did not appear to be a domestic threat to address. And that is a difference in view that we have to continue to explore."

The commission also heard testimony Friday morning behind closed doors from former Vice President Al Gore.

Former President Bill Clinton appeared before the panel in closed session on Thursday, but a Democratic commission member took issue Friday with Mr. Clinton's assertion that that there was not enough intelligence linking Al Qaeda to the 2000 bombing of the Navy destroyer Cole to justify a military attack on the terrorist organization.

"I think he did have enough proof to take action," Bob Kerrey, the former senator from Nebraska, said on ABC's `Good Morning America.'

Philip Shenon, Adam Nagourney and James Risen contributed reporting for this article.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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New York Times
April 10, 2004

White House Releases Aug. 6, 2001, Briefing

Associated Press

Presidential Daily Briefing, Aug. 6, 2001 (http://news.findlaw.com/nytimes/docs/terrorism/80601pdb.html)

A document sent to President Bush before the Sept. 11 attacks cited recent intelligence of a possible al-Qaida plot to strike inside the United States. The White House released the document Saturday.

"Clandestine, foreign government, and media reports indicate Bin Laden since 1997 has wanted to conduct terrorist attacks in the US,'' the memo to Bush stated. Bin Laden implied in U.S. television interviews in 1997 and 1998 that his followers would follow the example of World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef and "bring the fighting to America.''

The document, declassified Saturday, said that after President Clinton launched missile strikes on his base in Afghanistan in 1998, "bin Laden told followers he wanted to retaliate in Washington.'' The memo cited intelligence from another country, but the White House blacked out the name of the country.

Efforts to launch an attack from Canada around the time of "Y2K'' "may have been part of bin Laden's frst serious attempt to implement a terrorist strike in the U.S.'' the document states.

Convicted plotter Ahmed Ressam has told the FBI that he conceived an attack at about the same time on Los Angeles International Airport by himself, but that bin Laden lieutenant Abu Zubaydah "encouraged him and helped facilitate the operation,'' the document said.

Al-Qaida members, some of them American citizens, had lived in or traveled to the United States for years, the memo said.

"The group apparently maintains a support structure that could aid attacks,'' it warned.

The document said that "some of the more sensational threat reporting'' -- such as warnings that bin Laden wanted to hijack aircraft to win the release of fellow extremists'' -- could not be corroborated.

Since 1998, the FBI had observed "patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks.'' They included evidence of buildings in New York possibly being cased by terrorists.

A senior administration official said that incident involved two Yemeni men seen taking photos of Federal Plaza in Manhattan. The FBI interviewed the men and concluded they were tourists, the official said.

The document also said the CIA and FBI were investigating a call to the U.S. Embassy in the United Arab Emirates in May "saying that a group of Bin Ladin supporters was in the US planning attacks with explosives.''

Copyright 2004 The New York TImes Company

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NY1 News
April 11, 2004

Giuliani To Testify Before 9/11 Commission In New York

Former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani will testify before the commission investigating the September 11, 2001, attacks when public hearings move to New York City next month.

According to the New York Post, Giuliani will be asked about the level of cooperation between federal and local law enforcement authorities.

The commission will meet in New York on May 18 and 19. The first day will be devoted to the city's emergency response, and the second will focus on the terrorist plot.

Meanwhile, reaction to the White House's release of a pre-9/11 briefing memo on Osama bin Laden’s desire to stage an attack on United States soil is falling along party lines.

The Presidential Daily Briefing, dated August 6, 2001, and declassified Saturday under pressure from the commission, says, in part: “Clandestine, foreign government and media reports indicate bin Laden since 1997 has wanted to conduct terrorist attacks in the U.S.”

But the document goes on to say, “We have not been able to corroborate some of the more sensational threat reporting.” An example, the briefing says, is a report that bin Laden wanted to stage a hijacking to gain the release of terrorists held by the U.S.

The briefing also says, among other things, that Al Qaeda operatives were traveling to and from the U.S.; that Al Qaeda had a support network in the U.S. to aid in attacks; and that at least seventy FBI investigations of Al Qaeda operations inside the U.S. were underway.

Governor Jim Thompson, a Republican member of the 9/11 commission, said the document “didn't call for anything to be done by” President Bush. But Democratic commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste, a former Watergate prosecutor, said the memo calls into question National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice's testimony last week that it was a purely "historical" document.

Copyright 2004 NY1 News

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Newsday
April 14, 2004

Tenet: It will take time to improve intelligence

Associated Press

Slide Show: Previous testimony (http://www.nynewsday.com/news/local/manhattan/ny-911comm,0,1026849.photogallery?coll=nyc-manheadlines-manhattan)

CIA director George Tenet predicted Wednesday it will take "another five years of work to have the kind of clandestine service our country needs" to combat al-Qaida and other terrorist threats.

"The same can be said for the National Security Agency, our imagery agency and our analytic community," Tenet testified before the commission investigating the worst terror attacks in the nation's history.

He said a series of tight budgets dating to the end of the Cold War meant that by the mid-1990s, intelligence agencies had "lost close to 25 percent of our people and billions of dollars in capital investment."

A needed transformation is under way, he said, and appealed for a long-term commitment in funding. "Our investments in capability must be sustained," he added.

FBI Director Robert Mueller, who followed Tenet in the witness chair, said he is in the midst of an overhaul of his storied agency -- the target of withering criticism from the commission and others for failing to piece together the clues that pointed toward the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

"I think we can and are fixing what has been wrong with the FBI," he said, emphasizing that he has sought to turn it into an "intelligence-driven" organization with greater analytical and information-sharing capabilities. Still, he said, the changes "cannot be done overnight. Transitions take time."

Tenet's appearance was ironic to the core.

Several commissioners lavished praise on him for his foresight and efforts to restructure intelligence-gathering. Yet the panel's staff issued a report as the hearing opened that was sharply critical of the agency and apparatus he has lead for seven years as the nation's director of central intelligence.

"While we now know that al-Qaida was formed in 1988, at the end of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, the intelligence community did not describe this organization, at least in the documents we have seen, until 1999," the report said.

As late as 1997, it said, the CIA Counter-Terrorism Center "characterized Osama bin Laden as a financier of terrorism."

At the same time, though, the report said intelligence had recently received information revealing that bin Laden headed his "own terrorist organization" and had been involved in a number of attacks. These included one at a Yemen hotel where U.S. military personnel were quartered in 1992; the shooting down of Army helicopters in Somalia in 1993; and possibly the 1995 bombing of an American training mission to the Saudi Arabian National Guard.

It also noted several that "threat reports" produced by the intelligence apparatus had "mentioned the possibility of using an aircraft laden with explosives," such as the terrorists used on Sept. 11 in attacks that killed nearly 3,000.

"Of these, the most prominent asserted a possible plot to fly an explosives-laden aircraft into a U.S. city," it said. Others included reports of a plan to fly a plane into the Eiffel Tower in 1994, and of flying a plane into CIA headquarters.

Yet the counter terrorist center "did not analyze how a hijacked aircraft or other explosives-laden aircraft might be used as a weapon," the report said. If it had "it could have identified that a critical obstacle would be to find a suicide terrorist able to fly a large jet aircraft."

Tenet's appearance was his second in three weeks before the panel, which is charged with investigating the lapses that permitted the terror attacks to succeed, as well as recommending changes in the government to prevent any recurrence.

Mueller was the afternoon witness, and in a staff report released before his testimony, the commission said that despite improvements made, "institutional change takes time" and the agency has much to do.

"We heard from many analysts who complain that they are able to do little actual analysis because they continue to be assigned menial tasks, including covering the phones at the reception desk and emptying the office trash bins," the report said.

In his opening remarks, Mueller said that in the months since the terror attacks, the FBI has taken steps to turn itself into an "intellligence-driven" agency.

"We are accelerating the hiring and training of analytical personnel, and developing career paths for analysts that are commensurate with their importance to the mission of the FBI," he said.

Questioned by former Rep. Tim Roemer, D-Ind., Tenet said he did not speak with President Bush during August, 2001, a period marked by concern over possible terrorist attacks. "He was on vacation and I was here," Tenet said, although he also added that he could have picked up the phone and called the president at any time if he had felt a need to do so.

Readily acknowledging that intelligence agencies "never penetrated the 9-11 plot," Tenet said, "We all understood (Osama) bin Laden's intent to strike the homeland but were unable to translate this knowledge into an effective defense of the country."

He bristled at some of the criticisms, including one that said intelligence services lacked a strategic plan to gather and examine information collected about al-Qaida or that they had no adequate way to integrate and disseminate it.

"That's flat wrong," he said.

John Lehman, a former Navy secretary and commission member, characterized the commission's document as a "damning report of a system that's broken, that doesn't function."

Noting that Bush has recently signaled an interest in overhauling the nation's intelligence-gathering structure, Lehman said change was coming.

Tenet, who has held his job for seven years across parts of two administrations of different parties, said he would welcome it.

In its report, the commission said the CIA missed the big-picture significance of "tell-tale indicators" of impending terrorist attacks, partly because of its culture of a piecemeal approach to intelligence analysis.

A more strategic analysis could have identified that the plot might require suicide hijackers who would take flight courses, the commission said. Establishing such "tell-tale indicators" could have raised red flags following a July 2001 FBI report of terrorist interest in aircraft training in Arizona, and the August 2001 arrest of terrorism suspect Zacarias Moussaoui because of suspicious behavior in a Minnesota flight school, it added.

Copyright 2004 Newsday, Inc.

[Kris]

April 15, 2004

The Price of Incuriosity

Americans knew George W. Bush was an incurious man when they elected him, but the hearings of the 9/11 investigating commission, which turned yesterday from the F.B.I.'s fecklessness to the C.I.A.'s blurred vision, have brought that fact home in a startling way. The president is trying hard to present himself as a hands-on manager who talked terrorism incessantly with the director of central intelligence, George Tenet. ("I wanted Tenet in the Oval Office all the time.") But Mr. Tenet had to concede yesterday that he was not in Crawford, Tex., for the Aug. 6, 2001, briefing titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." Mr. Tenet told the panel he didn't meet with Bush all that month, but the C.I.A. later said there had been two meetings. No one has been able to say whether Mr. Bush followed up in any way after he asked his intelligence agencies whether there was a domestic threat from Al Qaeda, and got a loud "yes" in response.

As the president rightly said on Tuesday night, the only people responsible for the slaughter in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania on Sept. 11, 2001, were Osama bin Laden and the other terrorists. But to watch these hearings is to endure a terrifying review of the chances missed and balls dropped in the last two administrations.

According to a commission staff report, until the Sept. 11 attacks, the intelligence community had not done a National Intelligence Estimate on terrorism — a sweeping summary of the intelligence community's views — since 1997. And there was not a lot of comfort in the C.I.A.'s defensive response that there had been a steady stream of documents, briefings and meetings since 1995 on Al Qaeda's domestic threat, including to passenger airliners.

Mr. Bush has said repeatedly that no one could have envisioned "flying airplanes into buildings on such a massive scale." Perhaps not on that scale, but there were a half-dozen cases in the 1990's of terrorists trying to use planes as bombs, or plotting to do that. The 9/11 panel's staff report said the intelligence community had not kept up the post-Pearl Harbor practice of trying to anticipate and prepare for a surprise attack. When Mr. Tenet got the report on the arrest of Zacarias Moussaoui in late August 2001 ("Islamic Extremist Learns to Fly"), there was no warning system to be triggered.

Mr. Tenet and the panel's staff rightly noted that the C.I.A. suffered huge budget cuts in the 1990's under Democratic and Republican Congresses and that those cuts severely hurt its ability to gather and analyze intelligence. But the intelligence community also seemed to spin out of control. Just as Tuesday's testimony highlighted the urgent need to fix the F.B.I., and perhaps even rethink its role, yesterday's hearings argued for a drastic reform of intelligence. Mr. Tenet is already responsible for overseeing those efforts across the government, but he made it clear that his authority is mostly theoretical.

One useful proposal has been to give the C.I.A. chief control over all intelligence gathering, including the spy agencies of the Pentagon, which gets the biggest share of intelligence budgets. Asked about that idea yesterday, Mr. Tenet tactfully declined to clash with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who tried to create his own mini-C.I.A. at the Pentagon after 9/11. Mr. Tenet said anyone who started the turf wars necessary to get real control over all of the government's intelligence operations "probably would survive for about 20 minutes in terms of what's going on in this town."

It's easy to sympathize with Mr. Tenet's survival instincts. But he was closer to the mark when he said "it should all be on the table" when it comes to reforming the U.S. intelligence services. We hope that Mr. Bush, not to mention Mr. Rumsfeld, agree.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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New York Times
April 18, 2004

Evaluating the 9/11 Hearings' Winners and Losers

By ADAM NAGOURNEY and ERIC LICHTBLAU

Complete Coverage: 9/11 Commission (http://www.nytimes.com/pages/world/worldspecial5/)

From Sam Ervin to Earl Warren to Joseph McCarthy, high-powered investigative hearings in Washington have created heroes and villains, made and broken political careers, and rewritten history and biographies in unexpected ways. The Sept. 11 commission's hearings seem certain to take their place in that gallery.

In three months, the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States will offer its report on the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. But the verdict is coming in on the players in this drama in a city that thrives on anointing winners and losers, and on spotting the political implications behind even the most serious of events.

In Washington, devotees of the hearings — and there were many — saw jockeying among Democrats who might like a place in a John Kerry administration, White House aides seeking to protect their reputations at the expense of other aides, and Washington lions contemplating what the consultant James Carville has called "the comma" — the life-summarizing subordinate phrase that follows a name in an obituary.

"Walter Mondale was picked as vice president because Jimmy Carter was impressed with him on the Church commission," said Loch E. Johnson, a professor of political science at the University of Georgia who served on the staff of the commission, headed by Senator Frank Church of Idaho, that looked into abuses by the C.I.A. and the F.B.I.

Mr. Johnson said the players in this investigation were guided by iconoclastic moments from commission hearings past — think Howard Baker asking, "What did the president know and when did he know it?" With that in mind, here is a look at how they fared, in the view of Republicans and Democrats who followed the hearings.

JOHN ASHCROFT (AND JAMIE S. GORELICK) Mr. Ashcroft, the attorney general, was still recovering from gallbladder surgery when he testified. By the time he was finished, even some Republicans were saying he might have been better off staying at home, and some commission members suggested he may have damaged his relations with them.

Mr. Ashcroft went characteristically on the offensive, blaming the Clinton administration for many intelligence failures. He challenged the testimony of a former senior F.B.I. agent that he had been inattentive to warnings about a pending terrorist attack in 2001.

Then he produced a 1995 memorandum, declassified by the Justice Department in time for the hearings, outlining restrictions on sharing information between agents in criminal and intelligence investigations. He blamed the policy of building a "wall" for the failure of the C.I.A. and F.B.I. to share information that might have prevented the hijackings — and proceeded to point a finger.

"Full disclosure compels me to inform you that the author of this memorandum is a member of the commission," Mr. Ashcroft said. He did not name the member, but everyone on the panel knew he was talking about Ms. Gorelick, a Democrat who was the second-ranking official in the Clinton Justice Department.

The memorandum led some Republicans to call for her resignation, a demand that did not seem to go far. "Baloney," said John F. Lehman, a Republican on the panel, in response to the demand. But some Bush administration officials credited Mr. Ashcroft for mounting an aggressive and much-needed defense.

Mr. Ashcroft's challenge to Ms. Gorelick could prove a badge of honor for her should John Kerry win election, since she is on the list of people mentioned as a possible attorney general in a Kerry administration. One commission member said of Mr. Ashcroft's testimony, "The basic thrust was to put all the blame on Clinton, and he really made it very politicized." Ms. Gorelick, on the other hand, "came out looking really good," said Matt Bennett, a Democratic consultant.

BOB KERREY AND RICHARD BEN-VENISTE With his indignation, spirited questioning and energy so boundless that he mixed up the names of two star witnesses, Mr. Kerrey cut a memorable figure. Compared with Mr. Kerrey, Mr. Ben-Veniste was more prosecutorial, but both men stood out as tough questioners of White House officials, particularly Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser.

Mr. Ben-Veniste succeeded in goading Ms. Rice into one of the more memorable moments of the hearings by urging her to recite the name of the confidential briefing given to President Bush 36 days before the Sept. 11 attacks: "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S."

But at times the Democratic duo might have been too tough. Republicans have invoked what they describe as the two men's belligerent, partisan demeanor to challenge the credibility of the commission. "Ben-Veniste was the most partisan," said former Representative Vin Weber, a Minnesota Republican.

Even some Democrats said they might have been over the top. "They were a little too combative, and it sort of came off as a nasty spat," Mr. Bennett said.

Mr. Kerrey and Mr. Ben-Veniste are also potential candidates for positions in a John Kerry admiration. And their prospects would presumably be helped if Mr. Kerry, should he win, attributes part of his victory to political damage done to Mr. Bush by those exchanges.

RICHARD A. CLARKE To say that opinion is divided on Mr. Clarke would be an understatement. To Democrats, he was the man who spotlighted deficiencies in the response to warnings about Sept. 11, and embarrassed the White House with his apology to the families of victims of the attacks. That was arguably the defining moment of the hearings.

Consequently, Mr. Clarke should probably forget about any future employment in Washington as long as Republicans are in power. "He looks like a greedy, self-aggrandizing, bitter, score-settling political person," said Richard N. Bond, a former Republican national chairman.

Reminded that Mr. Clarke had at the very least become the author of a best-selling book that has been sold to Hollywood, Mr. Bond responded: "So what? He cashed in his 15 minutes of fame."

CONDOLEEZZA RICE On paper, at least, Ms. Rice did not appear to do particularly well. After her exchange with Mr. Ben-Veniste about the name of the Aug. 6, 2001, presidential briefing, she went on to minimize its importance, describing it as little more than a "historical" document. As it turned out, the briefing included evidence from as recently as May of that year.

But that has seemed to be more of a problem for the White House than for Ms. Rice, who tesitified after weeks of resistance by the administration. Her cool, poised and very prepared presence — at one point she flustered Mr. Kerrey by approvingly quoting one of his speeches to make a point — had members of both parties expressing admiration.

"You don't get to be a national superstar by appearing before adoring audiences," Mr. Weber said. "You get to be a superstar by doing what she did, which is going before a tough group of potential critics."

THOMAS H. KEAN Mr. Kean, the Republican chairman of the commission, emerged as its steady and reassuring face, along with, to a lesser extent, Lee H. Hamilton, the Democratic vice chairman. Some Republicans complained privately that Mr. Kean had allowed Democratic members too much rope in going after Bush administration witnesses, but most officials praised him, at least for his work during the hearings, as a model commission chairman.

"Kean came out good," said Representative Rahm Emanuel, Democrat of Illinois. "Lee Hamilton came out good. Honest, levelheaded. They are not doing it for the show. Dragnet. Just the facts."

ROBERT S. MUELLER III If there was an unexpected winner in the hearings, it was Mr. Mueller, the director of the F.B.I., who somehow managed to thrive even as his agency suffered one of the toughest public thrashings in its history. Several commission members said they had begun their work convinced that the F.B.I. was no longer up to the task of domestic counterterrorism, and that a separate agency for domestic intelligence might be needed. By the time Mr. Mueller was done, many members said they were not so certain.

Mr. Mueller, who took over the F.B.I. just a week before the attacks, "was very persuasive and very energetic and very capable," Mr. Ben-Veniste said. "He's obviously very motivated to try to keep the intelligence mission within the F.B.I."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[Kris]

April 29, 2004

The President's Testimony

It would have been a pleasure to be able to congratulate President Bush on his openness in agreeing to sit down today with the independent commission on the 9/11 attacks and answer questions. Unfortunately, Mr. Bush conditioned his cooperation on stipulations that range from the questionable to the ridiculous.

The strangest of the president's conditions is that he will testify only in concert with Vice President Dick Cheney. The White House has given no sensible reason for why Mr. Bush is unwilling to appear alone. (When asked at his recent press conference, the president gave one of his patented nonresponses: "Because it's a good chance for both of us to answer questions that the 9/11 commission is looking forward to asking us, and I'm looking forward to answering them.")

Given the White House's concern for portraying Mr. Bush as a strong leader, it's remarkable that this critical appearance is being structured in a way that is certain to provide fodder for late-night comedians, who enjoy depicting him as the docile puppet of his vice president.

Mr. Bush's reluctant and restrictive cooperation with the panel is consistent with the administration's pattern of stonewalling reasonable requests for documents and testimony and then giving up only the minimum necessary ground when the dispute becomes public. Today's testimony will be in private in the White House, away from reporters or television cameras. The session will not be recorded, and there will be no formal transcript. The president's aides have defended this excessive degree of secrecy with the usual arguments about protecting highly classified information and not wanting to establish dangerous precedents.

The idea that the panel may wring from Mr. Bush some comment that may endanger national security is ridiculous. The commission, led by the respected former Republican governor of New Jersey, Thomas Kean, has already heard, in public, from the leaders of the nation's top intelligence agencies, the secretary of defense and Mr. Bush's national security adviser. It seems highly unlikely that the president knows secrets more sensitive than they do. If he did, he would certainly be free to go off the record while discussing them.

The president's aides have also been arguing that making the event anything more than a "meeting" or informal discussion would establish a pattern that future chief executives would be forced to follow. That is true, in a way. If Mr. Bush or any of his successors have the tragic misfortune to be in command at a time when terrorists strike the country, killing thousands of innocent civilians, they should be expected to cooperate with the official investigations, and to do so in a way that puts their statements on the record and into history.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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Newsday
May 17, 2004

9/11 hearing set for Tues.

Associated Press

In the years since the Sept. 11 attacks, a rising chorus of New Yorkers has demanded a hard-edged probe of the city's emergency response, a public airing of shortcomings that would assign responsibility for a series of systemic flaws.

They may be disappointed when the national commission investigating the attacks meets Tuesday in a university auditorium in Greenwich Village.

The commission is expected to describe serious gaps in communication and coordination between the police and fire departments. But members of the commission and others familiar with its work said it would also seek to dispel what they called misconceptions that cast the city's rescue efforts in a poor light.

What's more, New York's efforts to improve emergency response since Sept. 11 will be cited as a national model, despite charges from victims' family members, firefighters and others that poor communication and cooperation between the police and fire departments has not improved, commission members said.

"They've made their evaluation and made corrections and made their preparations. I think the rest of the country has a lot to learn from the New York experience and I hope we play some role in disseminating that experience," said Lee Hamilton, the commission's vice chairman and a former Democratic congressman from Indiana.

"The picture that emerges will make people feel better about the New York authorities," said one person who helped produce a pair of reports to be delivered Tuesday morning, speaking on condition of anonymity because its findings were not yet officially released. "There's more good news in the story than embarrassment, for sure."

That portrayal may not be well received by relatives of the dead, many of whom believe that long-standing problems in the city's emergency response systems led to deaths in the towers.

"If the public understands that some of this could have been prevented, that there were systemic failures, perhaps that will help push change and reform," said Monica Gabrielle, who lost her husband.

Among a host of questions, relatives of the dead want to know why the twin towers' rooftop doors were locked on Sept. 11. Some workers were rescued from the north tower by helicopter during the 1993 trade center bombing.

Whether or not the doors were locked on Sept. 11, emergency officials have told commission researchers that heavy smoke and fire, along with a cluster of antennae on the north tower, would have made rooftop rescue virtually impossible.

"There is almost no possibility that anybody could have been rescued from the roofs," the person familiar with commission findings said.

Congress established the Sept. 11 commission to examine what led to the attacks and advise ways the government can do a better job of tracking terrorists and responding to an attack. The 10-member bipartisan panel is to issue its final report on July 26.

Last month, commissioners heard from President George Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, former President Bill Clinton and ex-Vice President Al Gore, as well as national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, CIA Director George Tenet and Attorney General John Ashcroft.

The panel will release its findings on planning and emergency response on Tuesday as current and former officials of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the New York fire, police and emergency management departments, the Homeland Security Department and the Arlington, Va., fire department sit down for two days of testimony at the New School University.

Former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and his heads of fire, police and emergency management are expected to portray the city's efforts that day as a flexible, cooperative response.

While some 2,749 people died, Giuliani, widely seen as heroic for his stewardship of the city through the crisis, has described the efforts -- in which 25,000 people were saved -- as the "greatest rescue mission in the history of the United States."

Current New York fire, police and emergency management officials are expected to testify Tuesday that relationships between the agencies have improved.

Police and firefighters fought for months over a set of rules governing which agency holds sway in emergencies ranging from water rescue to biological attack. The rules were completed last week and announced Friday. Sept. 11 commission members say those rules and other improvements could form part of a set of recommendations for national emergency response standards.

Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly is expected to emphasize New York's continuing vulnerability to terrorist attack, citing the case of a Pakistani-born truck driver, Iyman Faris, who was accused of plotting to cut through the cables of the Brooklyn Bridge and sentenced last year to 20 years in prison.

Kelly also plans to cite the case of Uzair Paracha, a Pakistani man accused of aiding al-Qaida by agreeing to help terrorists sneak into the United States, an official familiar with the commissioner's prepared testimony said.

Associated Press Writer Sara Kugler contributed to this report.

Copyright 2004 Newsday, Inc.

[BigMac]

NY1 News
May 17, 2004

Bloomberg To Testify Before 9/11 Commission

Mayor Michael Bloomberg on Monday decided to testify at the 9/11 commission hearings in New York City this week.

This is the second time the mayor, who took office three months after the September 11, 2001, attacks, has appeared before the commission. He also testified last year.

The hearings begin on Tuesday, and Bloomberg is scheduled to take questions Wednesday morning.

Former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani is also among the current and former city officials scheduled to testify.

The hearings in New York will focus on communication among emergency responders in the city after the World Trade Center was attacked. There's word commissioners have already questioned at least one deputy fire chief about radio communications.

There have also been reports the commission will point to a lack of communication between agencies but will praise the bravery and heroism of first-responders.

----------------------

More than two and half years after the September 11th terror attacks, the federal investigation will now publicly focus on the city's emergency response. What questions remain unanswered? NY1's John Schiumo has more in the following report.

No one can criticize the people who responded, the men and women who successfully led an unprecedented evacuation, the people who responded and helped save an estimated 25,000 lives. The response plan, however, was far from perfect.

“We don't know how many people got the word to evacuate. We're trying to put that together by having interviews,” former Fire Commissioner Thomas Von Essen said in December 2001. “We do know many people passed that word onto others.”

Poor communication - perhaps the greatest failure of the city's emergency response. For an example, look no further than when a police helicopter warned that the North Tower looked ready to collapse. Police officers heard the radio transmission and started to evacuate. Firefighters did not.

The failure to share critical information will be one focus of the 9/11 Commission.

“Everybody has a different recollection. In the chaos, people will remember different things," said former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani in 2001.

Two and a half years later, those in charge that day will be asked to remember why certain decisions were made. Why was the emergency command post first established inside the lobby of the doomed South Tower? Why did the Fire Department lose track of units and lose communication with others? How would the city have responded to a secondary attack, given that every available first responder was called to the World Trade Center?

Given the chaos of the moment, critical decisions were made on the fly. Like when the city ordered police helicopters to crash - in a suicide mission - into the fourth hijacked plane if it too targeted the Twin Towers.

“In reality, we were grasping at straws,” said Former Office of Emergency Management Commissioner Richard Sheirer in 2001.

Many of the problems of the day have been addressed. Better radios have been purchased. Cops and firefighters now conduct joint drills and exercises.

But many questions from that day remain unanswered. Why did public address announcements in the South Tower urge occupants to remain in the building moments before it was struck? Why were the rooftop doors locked, preventing possible rescue? What did city officials learn from the federal government about the threat of terrorism pre-9/11?

As the national spotlight continues to shine on the commission and its investigation, you can expect more defining moments in the aftermath of 9/11.

The 10-member panel is expected to issue its final report, complete with recommendations, before the end of July. Will lessons learned prevent another tragedy?

- John Schiumo

Copyright 2004 NY1 News

[Kris]

May 18, 2004

9/11 Panel Has a Question: Why Wasn't the City Prepared?

By PHILIP SHENON and KEVIN FLYNN

WASHINGTON, May 17 - Members of the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks say current and former city officials in New York will be confronted at public hearings on Tuesday and Wednesday about why New York was not better prepared to deal with a catastrophic terrorist attack and why the city is still struggling to coordinate the disaster-response plans of its police officers and firefighters.

The commission members said that many of the questions would center on the city government's failure before Sept. 11 to insist on greater cooperation between the long-feuding Police and Fire Departments, especially since the city had been the victim of earlier terrorist attacks, including the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.

Interim staff reports expected to be released at the hearings will praise the heroism of emergency-response workers on Sept. 11 but will suggest that their efforts were hampered by inadequate communications and a lack of coordination between the Police and Fire Departments, people who have seen drafts of the reports said on Monday.

Witnesses at the hearings will include Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who announced on Monday that he had decided to accept an invitation to appear before the 10-member panel, and his predecessor, Rudolph W. Giuliani, along with the city's current and former police and fire commissioners.

"We'll be asking questions that haven't been asked before, at least not publicly,'' said the panel's chairman, Thomas H. Kean, the former Republican governor of New Jersey.

Mr. Kean said in an interview that many questions about failures in the city's anti-terrorism planning before Sept. 11 and in its response the day of the attacks had not been asked in previous investigations because the issues were considered too sensitive given the loss of life at the World Trade Center and out of respect for the police officers and firefighters who died at the scene.

"I think the shock was so great to all of us who lived in the region, and we were so stunned for such a long time, that it wasn't the time for those questions,'' he said. "Now is the time.''

McKinsey & Company, an independent consulting firm, performed extensive studies of the police and fire responses for the city in 2002 that addressed many of the same issues now being considered. But the consultants, who did not charge the city, said at the time that their efforts were focused more on identifying specific improvements than in chronicling the day's events in exhaustive detail.

A Democratic member of the commission, Bob Kerrey, the former Nebraska senator who is now president of the New School University in New York, which is playing host to the hearings this week, said that "as we accumulate additional knowledge, it gets clearer and clearer how unprepared New York was.''

He said that much of the blame should fall on the federal government, which he said had failed to provide New York with the anti-terrorism help it deserved both as the nation's biggest city and as a past terrorist target. "You've got to see New York as a separate preparation issue,'' he said. "You've got to prepare it separately from every other location in the United States.''

Other commission officials said that unflattering comparisons would be drawn between the emergency responses in New York on Sept. 11 and at the Pentagon that morning.

The scale of the attack was significantly smaller at the Pentagon, which was struck by one of the hijacked planes, killing 59 people on the plane and 125 others on the ground. But the emergency-response has generally been praised for its coordination and speed.

"We certainly have an extremely difficult time making comparisons between the attack on the Pentagon and the attack on the World Trade Center,'' said another of the panel's Democrats, Timothy J. Roemer, a former House member from Indiana. "But the Pentagon response went pretty darn well. They implemented their existing emergency plan very well, and they had a single individual take control.''

Another scheduled witness at this week's hearings, Edward P. Plaugher, chief of the Fire Department in Arlington County, Va., which responded to the Pentagon attacks, said in an interview that he had long been surprised by the lack of coordination among emergency-response agencies in New York, especially between the Police and Fire Departments. "They had bifurcated,'' Chief Plaugher said. "They had pretty much established that they weren't going to work together.''

By comparison, he said, emergency-response agencies in communities in suburban Virginia around the Pentagon had drilled together for years, and had established radio frequencies that allowed them to talk to one another easily in the hours after the Sept. 11 attacks.

"We communicate regularly with all of our police and firefighters on the same radio system,'' he said. "We had actually drilled with the folks at the Pentagon. We knew the folks at the Pentagon by their first names, and at the F.B.I."

Mayor Bloomberg announced last week that the city's emergency agencies had reached a new, formal agreement to coordinate their response to major disasters, including terrorist attacks. But several academic experts and security consultants, as well as the chairman of the City Council's Public Safety Committee and the president of the Uniformed Fire Officers Association, have described the plan as seriously flawed.

The disparity between the positions of the Police and Fire Departments on how the lack of coordination affected the emergency response on Sept. 11th was evident two years ago when McKinsey & Company released its findings. In its report on the Fire Department, produced in collaboration with fire commanders, the consultants said the agency's response suffered because of a lack of coordination with the Police Department. In the Police Department report, similarly prepared with the help of police officials, the consultants said the coordination question was beyond the scope of its inquiry.

Philip Shenon reported for this article from Washington and Kevin Flynn from New York.


OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR

Save the Rescuers From One Another

By DENNIS SMITH

Today and tomorrow the 9/11 commission holds hearings in New York to examine the response of local and federal emergency response departments to the attacks. As someone who has spoken to hundreds of people who worked at ground zero, from top fire and police commanders to those who sifted through "the pile," one question continues to gnaw at my understanding: why was there such a disparity in the loss of life among first responders?

The heroism displayed by firefighters, police officers and emergency personnel on and after 9/11 will stay with me forever. As a New Yorker and a former firefighter, I will always be proud of their courage. Yet I have reluctantly come to the belief that the crisis at the World Trade Center was worsened by a lack of cooperation between the Fire and Police Departments.

The age-old antagonism between the services has become institutionalized. No other city in the nation has police and fire services as redundant and competitive as New York's. Though the beginnings of the rift are murky, it was created by the establishment of two special rescue organizations, one in each of the two largest emergency service teams in the world. For the safety of both our city and our first responders, these two operations should be merged.

Any analysis of 9/11 will show that the Fire and Police Departments, with some exceptions at the lower levels, could hardly be said to be working together. There is much evidence of inadequate communications on 9/11. The McKinsey report on the Fire Department's preparedness cited many communications received by 911 operators that were passed to the Police Department but never forwarded to the fire chiefs, information that could have saved lives.

When a Police Department helicopter pilot saw that the South Tower was falling, his announcement was instant — and police command issued a forceful and robust order to evacuate the remaining building and to move all department vehicles to safety. But fire chiefs did not hear this order. The command of the North Tower was covered with debris when the South Tower fell, and Chief Joseph Pfeifer, in darkness, gave the order, "All units in Tower One, evacuate the building."

Just how many firefighters escaped in the minutes from Chief Pfeifer's order until the tower's collapse is uncertain, but we do know that several police officers from the city and the Port Authority were killed when the second tower collapsed — along with 121 firefighters. Others were killed on the street. In all, almost 15 firefighters died for every city police officer. This suggests that there were successful communications in the Police Department, but not within the Fire Department or between the two departments.

One definition of readiness is to be highly motivated and fully understanding of both mission and risk. Yet it also means being properly trained in systems, procedures and equipment adequate to an emergency. Under this definition, it cannot be said that our first responders were prepared at ground zero. Fire and police were not having regular drills before the emergency, and there was no meaningful protocol in place.

The Department of Homeland Security has ordered the National Incident Management System to ensure an organized command during emergencies. Their coordination is codified by signed protocols — agreements of incident command between responding emergency organizations, whether they are local, state or federal. Just days ago, the Police and Fire Departments of New York signed a new protocol — 32 months after 9/11.

Yet protocols are not the answer. We have had them before. Except for the current commissioners, who have worked to solve the problem, the indifference of each department for the work of the other will remain.

Why? Because there is a territorial imperative that separates the two departments, which is caused by their separate rescue units. The Fire Department has five rescue companies, and the Police Department has an emergency services unit with 10 truck groups. Each police officer and firefighter in these units is well trained.

But their similarity in mission causes competition that is often divisive and sometimes harmful. It is this competition that will be found, historically, as the basis for the communications failure on 9/11, and which continues to this day.

Police officers and firefighters in these units also undergo similar training, no doubt share motivations and have a certain self-sufficient psychology. "This is my job, and I can handle it," both are likely to say. On 9/11, that psychology seemed to say, "We'll do our job, and let them do theirs." There is no reason to believe that this will change, for the new protocol relies on the recognition of core competencies to determine command. But each department believes it can handle any event.

The only way to solve these issues for the long run is through a third department — a Department of Rescue and Emergency Service. This new department could be created relatively quickly and cheaply, since the expertise and equipment for it already exist. Its commissioner would report directly to the mayor.

The Fire Department's rescue companies and Police Department's emergency services units have heroic histories, and many in their ranks have died saving the people of New York City. To meet the special demands of our times, however, the city would benefit by the creation of a third force, staffed only by elite members of the Police and Fire Departments.

Rescue companies and emergency services units are the lifeblood of any emergency operation. In New York City, both the Fire Department and Police Department have performed their duties with honor and bravery. But for our city to be prepared, we must not allow them to be competitive.

Dennis Smith, a former firefighter, is the author of "Report From Ground Zero: The Story of the Rescue Efforts at the World Trade Center."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[BigMac]

New York Times
May 18, 2004

Former City Officials Strongly Rebut Criticism of 9/11 Panel

By KIRK SEMPLE and TERENCE NEILAN

http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2004/05/18/national/18cnd-sept11.4.184.jpg
Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly testified about the elaborate series of institutional, technological and personnel improvements that have been implemented in his department.

Neveral former New York City emergency service officials testifying today before the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks vociferously rebutted charges that their departments' response to the catastrophe suffered from age-old rivalries and a lack of coordination between the departments.

"I have yet to hear a single instance where anybody shows me anything where the agencies did not work together and coordinate their efforts," said Richard Sheirer, former director of the New York City Office of Emergency Management. "I urge the commission to take a very close listen to the tapes on all the various agencies."

A 26-page staff report by the commission concluded that faulty communication severely hindered rescue efforts by city workers on Sept. 11, 2001. The report praised the heroism of many of the city's workers, but pointed out communications gaps that included a lack of coordination between the Police and Fire Departments and an inability to share information effectively between on-scene officials and 911 phone operators. The report also suggested that the longstanding rivalry between the Police and Fire Departments contributed to the failure in communication.

Mr. Sheirer's staunch defense of the the city's response on Sept. 11 was echoed in angry testimony from two other former emergency-services officials, Bernard B. Kerik, former police commissioner of New York, and Thomas Von Essen, the city's former fire commissioner. The men were among eight former and current city officials who testified in the first day of a two-day hearing by the commission, which is exploring the city's disaster preparedness both before and since the terrorist strikes.

The commission has for months worked out of Washington and kept its focus on federal responsibilities leading up to the attacks. But the proceedings acquired a new level of resonance and poignancy today by shifting to an auditorium in downtown New York, only blocks from the World Trade Center site, the place where the attackers inflicted their deepest wounds.

The commissioners acknowledged the sensitivity of their task here. "Today will be a very difficult day, to relive the loss and the terrible devastation," the panel's chairman, Thomas H. Kean, said as he opened the hearing. "Our purpose in presenting this information is to obtain the perspective from those who responded to the attacks. We want to know how and why they made the decisions they made, often in the absence of good information, and sometimes under the most adverse conditions."

The session opened with a dramatic presentation of the staff report, which documented the heroics and the failures of the response to the 9/11 attack. The commission illustrated the presentation of its report with documentary-style video testimonies from witnesses and survivors, photographs, and charts and other graphics, created a dramatic minute-by-minute rendering of events inside and around the World Trade Center on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001.

Victims' relatives, survivors and rescue personnel packed the auditorium at New School University. As the panel replayed amateur video footage of the two planes slamming into the towers, and the towers' subsequent collapse, some members of the audience wept.

After the reading, Mr. Kean called for a moment of silence.

The hearing took a dramatic turn early in the afternoon when John F. Lehman, a commission member and former secretary of the Navy, said the command and control of New York's public service was fractured and "dysfunctional."

"It's not worthy of the Boy Scouts, let alone this great city," he said, addressing Mr. Sheirer, Mr. Kerik and Mr. Von Essen. "It's not rocket science. It's just overruling the pride of the individual agencies" so that "you don't get into fistfights of who's in charge in an ambiguous situation."

Mr. Von Essen told Mr. Lehman that such comments were "outrageous."

"You make it sound like everything was wrong about September 11 or the way we function," Mr. Von Essen said angrily.

Mr. Von Essen, Mr. Kerik and Mr. Sheirer are retired from the city but have continued to work together, as consultants in the consulting firm of former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, who was their boss on Sept. 11.

The panel quizzed the witnesses — also including the current top emergency service officials and former officials of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey — on a wide range of questions regarding training, rescue and evacuation procedures, emergency communication systems and command and control.

The commissioners also wanted to know about the level of catastrophe preparedness at the World Trade Center, particularly following the bombing in 1993.

Alan Reiss, former director of the Port Authority's world trade department, said there was concern about a vehicle-borne bomb "but never did we have a thought about what happened on 9/11."

He added that the department was never briefed by the F.B.I. on Osama bin Laden, or that hijacking might be in his terror group's plans.

He also said that in terms of lessons learned from 9/11, response plans must be in place before an emergency happens, and that there should be a change in the sharing of intelligence at the state, local and federal level, "and that those who refuse to change must be removed."

Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly, Fire Commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta and Joseph F. Bruno, the current commissioner of the New York City Office of Emergency Management, who appeared before the panel in the afternoon session, testified about the elaborate series of institutional, technological and personnel improvements that have been implemented in their departments.

Mr. Kean, a former Republican governor of New Jersey, said in a recent interview that the panel was prepared to ask the tough questions that have been avoided in previous investigations because the issues were considered too sensitive given the loss of life at the World Trade Center and the devastating impact on the Police and Fire Departments.

"We'll be asking questions that haven't been asked before, at least not publicly," he said in an interview.

"I think the shock was so great to all of us who lived in the region, and we were so stunned for such a long time, that it wasn't the time for those questions," he said. "Now is the time."

Witnesses at the hearing on Wednesday will include Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and his predecessor, Rudolph W. Giuliani, along with Thomas J. Ridge, secretary of homeland security.

McKinsey & Company, an independent consulting firm, performed extensive studies of the police and fire responses for the city in 2002 that addressed many of the same issues now being considered. But the consultants, who did not charge the city, said at the time that their efforts were focused more on identifying specific improvements than in chronicling the day's events in exhaustive detail.

A Democratic member of the commission, Bob Kerrey, the former Nebraska senator who is now president of the New School University in New York, said in a recent interview that "we accumulate additional knowledge, it gets clearer and clearer how unprepared New York was."

He said that much of the blame should fall on the federal government, which he said had failed to provide New York with the anti-terrorism help it deserved both as the nation's biggest city and as a past terrorist target. "You've got to see New York as a separate preparation issue," he said. "You've got to prepare it separately from every other location in the United States."

Mayor Bloomberg announced last week that the city's emergency agencies had reached a new, formal agreement to coordinate their response to major disasters, including terrorist attacks. But several academic experts and security consultants, as well as the chairman of the City Council's Public Safety Committee and the president of the Uniformed Fire Officers Association, have described the plan as seriously flawed.

The disparity between the positions of the Police and Fire Departments on how the lack of coordination affected the emergency response on Sept. 11 was evident two years ago when McKinsey & Company released its findings. In its report on the Fire Department, produced in collaboration with fire commanders, the consultants said the agency's response suffered because of a lack of coordination with the Police Department. In the Police Department report, similarly prepared with the help of police officials, the consultants said the coordination question was beyond the scope of its inquiry.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[BigMac]

New York Times
May 19, 2004

Giuliani Mounts Spirited Defense of City's Response to 9/11

By TERENCE NEILAN

Former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani mounted a calm but spirited defense today of the role played by firefighters, the police, and their leaders after the attacks on the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.

A day after criticism of New York City's fire and police commissioners by members of the independent commission investigating the attacks, Mr. Giuliani said that rather than seeing uniformed officers fleeing as civilians were left behind, "we got a story of heroism, we got a story of pride, and we got a story of support that helped get us through."

He also told of a "a superb command structure" that "was beyond any expectation that anyone could possibly have had."

Mr. Giuliani declared in an opening statement that although mistakes had been made, "Our enemy is not each other, but the terrorists who attacked us."

He added, to applause from the audience, "The blame should be put on one source alone, the terrorists who killed our loved ones."

The former mayor, who was addressed with respect by panel members, gave a detailed account of his actions the day of the catastrophe, explaining how he went to the area of the Twin Towers accompanied by top officials.

"I said to the police commissioner that we're in uncharted territory," he said, "we've never been through anything like this before and we're going to have to do the best that we can to keep everybody together, to keep them focused."

Mr. Giuliani was widely hailed at home and overseas for his take-charge attitude after 9/11, becoming the central figure in rallying New Yorkers and instilling a sense that even a catastrophe of such magnitude could be faced and overcome.

Day after day, his calm explanation of complicated, tragic news was credited with helping to convince a traumatized city that it would pull through.

He attended funerals, comforted survivors, urged New Yorkers to continue to dine out and tentative tourists to visit. The man whose political career had seemed over just a few weeks before was now being greeted with cheers wherever he went.

The former mayor, whose main claim to fame in office before 9/11 was in overseeing a dramatic drop in the city's crime rate, even suggested a subsequently rejected plan that would have allowed him to continue in office after his term expired on Dec. 31, 2001.

"Rudy's focus was on crime," said the man who succeeded him in office, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. "My biggest problems are going to be education and the deficit, along with the problems from the economy and the World Trade Center terrorism. It's just going to be a different measure."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[Agglomeration]

After hearing this, I'm happier than ever that the WTC site didn't become a 16-acre memorial :roll: .

Giuliani Lauds 9/11 'Heroes' Amid Angry Hecklers during 9-11 Inquiry

By Ellen Wulfhorst and Caroline Drees

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani (news - web sites) on Wednesday passionately defended local firefighters and police after the rescue departments' response to Sept. 11 received sharp criticism from the commission investigating the attacks.

Giuliani's ardent testimony was at times interrupted by emotional hecklers, including one who shouted her son was murdered. He spoke after a commission staff report said rescue officials in New York and Washington are still not prepared to handle another disaster because coordination and communications flaws that hampered rescue efforts on Sept. 11 persist today.

"Catastrophic emergencies and attacks have acts of great heroism attached to them. They have acts of ingenious creativity attached to them and they have mistakes that happen," Giuliani said. "When human beings are put under these conditions that's what happens."

"Blame should be directed at one source and one source alone -- the terrorists who killed our loved ones."

The commission said on Tuesday, the first of two days of hearings, that rivalries between the police and fire departments, equipment problems and weak coordination had hurt rescue efforts.

Giuliani rebuffed talk of confusion over who was in charge during the disaster, saying, "There was not a problem of coordination on Sept. 11."

Rescue officials "carried out the mission under great emotion, under great stress flawlessly, and that's because they have a superb command structure and a structure in which they know how to deal with emergencies," Giuliani said.

About 25,000 people escaped or were rescued from the 110-story twin towers before they collapsed after being hit by hijacked airplanes, but nearly 3,000 people, including 343 firefighters and 23 police, were killed.

ANGRY HECKLERS

Angry hecklers in the audience, which included family members of victims, lashed out at Giuliani and the commission, saying they were dodging the tough questions about what went wrong in 2001.

One woman (Sally Regenhard- remember her? :? ) cried, "My son was murdered." Another man shouted "talk about the radios" -- a reference to communications problems on the day of the attacks.

One man was removed from the room after he demanded time to question the mayor, screaming: "Three thousand people murdered does not mean leadership. ... Let me ask the real questions."

The commission, meeting less than two miles from where the World Trade Center towers once stood, said earlier that while progress had been made to iron out problems exposed by the attacks, rescue officials were still ill-prepared to handle a similar incident.

"It is a fair inference, given the differing situation in New York City and northern Virginia, that the problems in command, control and communications that occurred at both sites will likely recur in any emergency of a similar scale," a commission staff report said.

It said both cities, as well as cities across the United States, had to ensure their emergency response plans were in place and effective. The national capital region already had such an "incident command system" before Sept. 11, while New York only launched its own on Friday.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg also spoke on Wednesday and Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge was scheduled to testify later in the day.

On Tuesday, the commission said that apart from reports of turf battles, which rescue officials said were overblown, the rescue mission suffered from communications equipment such as radios which were not designed to link different departments.

"The biggest failure was our inability to get the two (fire and police) to talk on the same (radio) frequency," Jerome M. Hauer, former director of New York City's Office of Emergency Management, acknowledged on Wednesday.

The commission is working to complete its final report by July 26.

For more info look up http://story.news.yahoo.com/fc?cid=34&tmpl=fc&in=US&cat=Terrorism

[TLOZ Link5]

Monica Iken, Nikki Stern, and the less-vocal 9/11 family members are now the only ones whom I have real respect for. As much as we on this forum may disagree with them, particularly about the redevelopment of Ground Zero, they have dignity and tact that I can't help but admire. I still have sympathy for Sally Regenhard and her ilk for their losses, but let's think. This (Giuliani) is the man who comforted them in their hour of need as best a politician can, attended their loved ones' funerals, stood beside them and lobbied with them for what they wanted in a memorial downtown. This is how they repay him?

My honest, current opinions of them as human beings cannot possibly be written or articulated in a remotely civil way.

I'll leave it at that.

[Kris]

May 20, 2004

WITNESSES

Mayor Tells Panel 'Pork Barrel Politics' Is Increasing Risk of Terrorism for City

By PHILIP SHENON and KEVIN FLYNN

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg told the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks yesterday that the federal government is placing New York City in greater danger by providing too little money to defend the city against future terrorist attacks.

Describing the nation's counterterrorism budget as "pork barrel politics at its worst,'' Mr. Bloomberg told the commission that under current spending formulas, states and cities with little threat of being attacked are getting far more in federal subsidies per capita than New York. "It's the kind of shortsighted 'me first' nonsense that gives Washington a bad name,'' the mayor said, and "has the effect of aiding and abetting those who hate us and plot against us."

At the same time, however, Mr. Bloomberg testified that his efforts to make New York the safest big city in the nation had helped make it "better prepared than at any time in its history to prevent and respond to any danger, no matter its source.''

The mayor's barbed remarks came in a 15-minute statement he made on the second of two days of landmark hearings in Manhattan by the commission, which came to New York to offer to most exhaustive public accounting to date of how the city government responded to the attacks on the World Trade Center on Sept. 11. He was not questioned by the 10-member commission, whose star witness yesterday was Mr. Bloomberg's predecessor, Rudolph W. Giuliani.

Mr. Giuliani defended his administration from criticism leveled by the panel on Tuesday that the heroic response of the police and firefighters, while generally effective, had been undermined by problems including faulty communications and a lack of coordination between the agencies.

The panel, which met at the New School University, not far from the attack site, was noticeably softer in questioning Mr. Giuliani than it had been with his former police, fire and emergency management commissioners the day before. But New York's readiness for another attack remained an issue.

Commission members have accused the Bloomberg administration of doing too little to force the city's Police and Fire Ddepartments to work together to deal with terrorist threats. Although Mayor Bloomberg announced a new plan last week to coordinate the response of the Police and Fire Ddepartments at emergencies, panel members criticized it on Tuesday as too complex and lacking clear lines of authority. The commission's vice chairman described it as a "prescription for confusion.''

Mr. Bloomberg lashed out at that criticism yesterday, saying detractors did not understand how the plan would work.

"We all seek clarity in complex situations," he said. "But that doesn't mean we should seek simplistic solutions to complex situations."

One critic of the plan, Mr. Giuliani's former emergency management commissioner, Jerome M. Hauer, testified yesterday that the roles of the agencies must be more clearly defined. "Too much time is spent on needless haggling over who's in charge when the time would be better spent in interagency drills and training,'' Mr. Hauer said.

The Bloomberg administration has said it views Mr. Hauer's criticisms as politically motivated because he campaigned for the mayor's Democratic opponent in the last election.

The secretary of homeland security, Tom Ridge, testifying after Mr. Hauer, said the city's plan appeared to be a step in the right direction. But he said it may need modifications if it is to qualify for federal funds that are being made available to localities with approved emergency response plans.

At the conclusion of the hearing, the panel's chairman, Thomas H. Kean, and its vice chairman, Lee H. Hamilton, released a joint statement that saluted the "acts of heroism'' on Sept. 11 but repeated many of the criticisms aired Tuesday.

"Effective decision-making in New York was hampered by limited command and control and internal communications,'' they said. "Poor communications across agencies harmed situational awareness. Fire chiefs did not know what the N.Y.P.D. knew and knew less than what TV viewers knew.''

In a staff report yesterday, the commission drew a sharp comparison between New York City's response and the "generally effective'' response by rescue agencies in northern Virginia that rushed that same morning to the scene of the plane crash at the Pentagon. While acknowledging that the Pentagon attack was significantly smaller in scale, the report found that the response there "was mainly a success'' that could be credited to "strong professional relationships and trust established among emergency responders'' in the Virginia suburbs of the capital.

New York's need for counterterrorism financing resonated throughout the hearings as panelist after panelist reiterated a belief that it was only a matter of time before the next terrorist strike and that the city was a likely target.

Mr. Bloomberg, a Republican, primarily blamed Congress, noting that the proposed 2004 federal budget cut the city's homeland security funds by nearly half, to $96 million.

But Representative Anthony Weiner, a Democrat who represents Brooklyn and Queens, said after yesterday's session that part of Mr. Bloomberg's problem - the growing number of cities that are being defined as high-threat areas eligible for counterterrorism funds - was the work of the Bush administration.

"The mayor chose party-line defense of the president,'' he said, "over full-throated criticism of an administration that has directed New York's terror funds to cities like St. Paul and Louisville."

A spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, Katy Mynster, said the agency had been working to respond to New York's needs. In 2003, she said, the federal government gave the city and its region more than $281 million in gr