9/11 Panel Comments Freely (Some Critics Say Too Freely)

As President Bush was appearing at a news conference on Tuesday night, the two leaders of the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks were not behind closed doors dissecting intelligence documents. They were sitting at a CNN studio here waiting to go on "Larry King Live."

One of them, Thomas H. Kean, the former New Jersey governor who is the commission's chairman, said he and his colleagues were so determined to be credible with Americans that they decided early on to conduct themselves in a very public manner.

"We made a conscious decision, and part of it was under strong pressure from the families, to make this commission as transparent and as visible as possible," Mr. Kean said in an interview.

But Democrats and Republicans alike have raised concerns about the degree to which commission members are discussing their deliberations on television and, even, in newspaper columns — to the point that they are spinning their views like the politicians that many of them are.

Americans can hardly turn on a television or pick up a newspaper these days without seeing or reading about a member of the commission. From the Fox News Channel to ABC to newspapers including The Wall Street Journal, panel members have been providing a running commentary about the investigation as it unfolds, sometimes drawing blunt conclusions months before the final report is to be published in late July.

The accessibility of the commissioners to the news media, not to mention the openness of their views, is a departure from similar independent commissions of the past. Its members' openness troubles some officials here, who say they worry that it is giving the panel an edge that will taint its conclusions — especially when coupled with what some have called a partisan tone to members' questions at the hearings here.

The two independent panels that Sept. 11 commission staff members say they consider to be most similar in their charge to this one are those that investigated the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the bombing of Pearl Harbor, both of which worked largely out of public view.

Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, a Republican who worked as a lawyer for the Warren Commission, which investigated the Kennedy assassination, said in an interview this week that it had operated like a jury. "When a jury goes out, you don't give a report in midstream on what you're doing, expressing opinions," Mr. Specter said. In the case of the Sept. 11 commission, he added, "Speaking so freely to the press while they're in midstream tends to politicize it when they come to their conclusions."

Former President Gerald R. Ford, who was a member of the Warren Commission, echoed that view. "I think they could do a better job if they were less public-relations related," he said. "I think it will have an adverse impact on their report."

One commissioner, Bob Kerrey, has written two newspaper opinion pieces, including one for The New York Times on Sunday in which he asserted "9/11 could have been prevented." Another commissioner, Richard Ben-Veniste, said on CNN last week that before the attacks "we had some very useful intelligence."

At times, commissioners have appeared on competing television networks at the same time. Some have gone on several networks in the course of a single day, to predict the direction of testimony that is to come or to analyze it — sometimes to disagree with it — afterward.

Late last month, John F. Lehman, a Republican commissioner, said of Richard A. Clarke, the former counterterrorism official who has said the Bush administration did not take his warnings about terrorism seriously before the attacks, "I think he has a credibility problem."

Last week, Jamie S. Gorelick, a Democrat on the commission, was asked if she agreed with testimony from Mr. Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, that there was no piece of evidence that "would have led to connecting all of those dots." Ms. Gorelick said on CNBC that she did not.

"There are dozens of pieces of information which, if they had been brought to one table," she said, "you have to believe we would have had a shot at preventing this."

On Wednesday night, Ms. Gorelick agreed to an appearance on "Hardball" on MSNBC to address a call for her resignation from the panel by Representative F. James Sensenbrenner Jr., Republican of Wisconsin, who appeared on the program to discuss charges that her work for the Justice Department in the Clinton administration posed a conflict.

Such accessibility has come to the delight of news producers. "It's refreshing that the principals in a really important moment in American history are available, and they're usually not," said David Bohrman, the CNN Washington bureau chief.

Yet even one of CNN's commentators, the conservative Tucker Carlson, cited on "Crossfire" on Wednesday what he said were Mr. Ben-Veniste's appearances on at least six programs over the course of the last five days and said, "He's destroying the credibility of these proceedings."

For his part, Mr. Ben-Veniste said, "Our chairman has encouraged us to discuss the open work of the commission, because a large part of our function is to inform the public."

Mr. Kean said the panel had closely studied the work of the commissions that examined the Pearl Harbor attack and the Kennedy assassination and concluded that their secrecy did not serve them well — particularly in the case of the assassination, about which conspiracies still abound. "Those other commissions failed in many ways," Mr. Kean said. "They were sometimes not looked on as credible."

Dr. Loch K. Johnson, a professor at the University of Georgia, said Mr. Kean's commission was conducting itself more like Congressional investigative committees — like the ones that looked into the Watergate break-in and the Iran-contra scandal — which have traditionally been far more open, and partisan, than their independent counterparts.

The Sept. 11 commission has come under attack from conservatives in the last two weeks, in particular, for what they say has been undue criticism of the Bush administration. Those assertions concern more than the members' public appearances; they take issue with the members' questioning of witnesses. As part of its posture, the commission has taken the unusual step of releasing several interim staff reports about the progress of its inquiry that point to missed or ignored clues.

The New York Post published a front-page editorial titled "National Disgrace" on Wednesday, criticizing as "sewn from whole cloth" a staff briefing paper that the newspaper said "paints a picture of alarm bells going off throughout Washington in the months before 9/11."

Last week, Senator Mitch McConell, Republican of Kentucky, charged from the Senate floor that the commission, made up of five Democrats and five Republicans, had "become a political casualty of the electoral hunting season." Mr. McConnell did not respond to requests for comment. The senator's remarks helped to persuade the commission leaders to urge their colleagues to tamp down any partisanship at the hearings, people close to the panel said.

But that did not stop Mr. Kerrey, a former Democratic senator from Nebraska, who said: "Mitch McConnell is the Republican whip of the Senate and he's accusing us of being too partisan? He can go to hell for all I'm concerned."

Mr. Kerrey said the tough questioning and the television and print appearances had helped shake loose information from the White House that would not have otherwise been released.

Acknowledging that, Ivo H. Daalder, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who was on President Bill Clinton's national security staff, said that since this is an election year, "the commission ought to be well aware that too much public exposure will feed suspicion by those who are already so inclined of the commission's political motivation."

Mr. Kean said even if he wanted to avoid the news media, it would be next to impossible in the age of the major 24-hour news networks. "People are going to be talking about us anyway," he said. "We would rather have the commission talking about us rather than talking heads."

Thomas Kean blames their TV unprofessionalism on pressure from the 9/11 families? You have got to be kidding me.

More here on the non-coverage of Kerrey's "go to hell" comment in the media.

Kerrey, what a statesman LOL!

I like the Commission's antics. Along with Gorelick's participation, they have reduced its deliberations to the status of a bad joke. I used to think highly of Kean, btw, but no more. He seems to be one of those "go along to get along" guys while everyone else is in a frantic bid to achieve their partisan ends.

Well, the NY Times itself ran an OpEd propaganda piece by Bob Kerrey, a fact they bury deep in this article.

It must be that they are worried that the bloom is off the rose. Too many public appearances, too much obvious partisan propaganda. The Times's solution? Run another article blaming everybody else.

"Screw you all. I will and DO NOT HAVE TO STEP DOWN.
Did you forget that Commission Counsel David Marcus,
the Legal Counsel of the Commission, was my
partner in Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering
where we are PROUD, PROUD, to count among our terrorist clients Prince Mohammed al Faisal,
one of the top three alleged "financiers" of the 9/11 atrocities."

Who's Who on the 9/11 "Independent" Commission

Jamie S Gorelick
Vice Chair
Fannie Mae
$2,000 John Kerry

Jamie Gorelick
Partner
Wilmer Cutler and Pickering
$2,000 Dick Gephardt

Jamie Gorelick
Attorney
Wilmer Cutler & Pickering
$1,000 Wesley Clark

"We made a conscious decision, and part of it was under strong pressure from the families, to make this commission as transparent and as visible as possible," Mr. Kean said in an interview

Oh, is this the same guy who said Jamie Gorelick is the most non-partisan member of the commission and that the public should just butt-out of their business?

...that Janet Reno was just a figurehead and she ran the Justice Dept. into the ground

I found this in an old article published in the wake of the WACO fiasco:

Newsweek, July 31, 1995 v126 n5 p28(2)
Reno's darkest hours.
Reno has largely given up making policy and instead spends her time making speeches outside Washington. (She’s visited 37 states so far.) Meanwhile, she has ceded day-to-day management of Justice to Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick. Reno is “frustrated by the bureaucracy,” says one acquaintance. The federal law-enforcement bureaucracy is proving vexing right now, from revelations that FBI agents attended a racist gathering in Tennessee to the recent demotion of Deputy FBI Director Larry Potts over the controversial 1992 shoot-out with white supremacist Randy Weaver. Justice and FBI officials have publicly differed on who pushed to dump Potts, and aides say relations between Gorelick and FBI Director Louis Freeh have turned frosty. (“That’s absolutely ridiculous,” Gorelick insists.)

Great find.

Much stronger than this one I just came across:

"It has been an open secret in Washington that the Department of Justice was run by her hardheaded deputy, Jamie Gorelick" -- Maureen Dowd in 1997 confirming what Dick Morris recently said on H&C

http://www.s-t.com/daily/03-97/03-14-97/b04op061.htm

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