From Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball at Newsweek:
Even as White House political aides plot a 2004 campaign plan designed to capitalize on the emotions and issues raised by the September 11 terror attacks, administration officials are waging a behind-the-scenes battle to restrict public disclosure of key events relating to the attacks. At the center of the dispute is a more-than-800-page secret report prepared by a joint congressional inquiry detailing the intelligence and law-enforcement failures that preceded the attacks—including provocative, if unheeded warnings, given President Bush and his top advisers during the summer of 2001.The report was completed last December; only a bare-bones list of “findings” with virtually no details was made public. But nearly six months later, a “working group” of Bush administration intelligence officials assigned to review the document has taken a hard line against further public disclosure. By refusing to declassify many of its most significant conclusions, the administration has essentially thwarted congressional plans to release the report by the end of this month, congressional and administration sources tell NEWSWEEK. In some cases, these sources say, the administration has even sought to “reclassify” some material that was already discussed in public testimony—a move one Senate staffer described as “ludicrous.” The administration’s stand has infuriated the two members of Congress who oversaw the report—Democratic Sen. Bob Graham and Republican Rep. Porter Goss. The two are now preparing a letter of complaint to Vice President Dick Cheney.
Graham is “increasingly frustrated” by the administration’s “unwillingness to release what he regards as important information the public should have about 9-11,” a spokesman said. In Graham’s view, the Bush administration isn’t protecting legitimate issues of national security but information that could be a political “embarrassment,” the aide said. Graham, who last year served as Senate Intelligence Committee chairman, recently told NEWSWEEK: “There has been a cover-up of this.”
Click here to read the rest of the story.
I have a feeling Michael Moore will have some fun with this one:
His next film, titled "Fahrenheit 911," is scheduled for release in the two months before Election Day. It tells "in part the story of twin errant sons of different oilmen," he says, and will stir together the pre-9/11 intersection of Bush and bin Laden family business interests when both had ties to the Carlyle Group. Such connections "may mean nothing," Mr. Moore concedes. But then he recalls Jane Mayer's article in the November 2001 New Yorker about the private Saudi jet that the Bush administration permitted to fly 24 members of the bin Laden family out of the country after 9/11, before they could be questioned in detail by the F.B.I. "Here's one question I want to pose," he says. "What if on the day after Oklahoma City, Bill Clinton, suddenly worried about the safety of the McVeigh family up in Buffalo, allowed a jet to pick them all up and take them out of the country, not to return?" You can already fantasize how Mr. Moore, once he is turned away from the White House, might travel to Kennebunkport to pursue the first President Bush in retirement much as he did Charlton Heston in "Bowling for Columbine."
Once again, I think Senator John Edwards put it best, back in February:
Posted by Mike at May 2, 2003 01:59 AM | TrackBack
I want to be a champion for the regular people that make this country great. People like my father - they aren't insiders, they don't have lobbyists. Their only hope is that their President goes to work every day thinking about how to make their lives better, and has the backbone and courage to stand up against anything that stands in their way.Then you have this President. George Bush comes from a very different place, and runs the country in a very different way. He believes he and his friends know best. They govern looking down - they figure they'll tell us what they think we need to know, when they think we need to know it. Under them, we get government of the insiders, by the insiders, for the insiders.
The people get left behind. Well, the people deserve better, and it is time for us to stand up and say so!