TOTAL INFORMATION ANALYSIS

Sunday, October 26, 2003

From New York Times:

The chairman of the federal commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks said that the White House was continuing to withhold several highly classified intelligence documents from the panel and that he was prepared to subpoena the documents if they were not turned over within weeks. . . .

The chairman, Thomas H. Kean, the former Republican governor of New Jersey, also said . . . that while he had not directly threatened a subpoena in his recent conversations with the White House legal counsel, Alberto R. Gonzales, "it's always on the table, because they know that Congress in their wisdom gave us the power to subpoena, to use it if necessary." . . .

Mr. Kean suggested that he understood the concerns of the White House about the sensitivity of the documents at issue, saying that they were the sort of Oval Office intelligence reports that were so sensitive and highly classified that they had never been provided to Congress or to other outside investigators.

"These are documents that only two or three people would normally have access to," he said. "To make those available to an outside group is something that no other president has done in our history. . . .

Mr. Kean said he was barred by an agreement with the White House from describing the Oval Office documents at issue in any detail — he said the White House was "quite nervous" about any public hint at their contents — other commission officials said they included the detailed daily intelligence reports that were provided to Mr. Bush in the weeks leading up to Sept. 11. The reports are known within the White House as the Presidential Daily Briefing. . . .

Last year, the White House confirmed news reports that President Bush received a written intelligence report in August 2001, the month before the attacks, that Al Qaeda might try to hijack American passenger planes. . . .

TOTAL INFORMATION ANALYSIS: I'll believe when I see it. Besides, it's not like those "two or three" people haven't had more than 2 years to gin up a fake document anyway . . .

| Posted at 20:13 | PERMA-LINK |

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