TERROR ATTACKS Rice set to testify for 9/11 panel

The panel got only a fourth of the archives Clinton sent to the Bush White House.
LOS ANGELES TIMES
WASHINGTON -- Condoleezza Rice, the White House national security adviser, will testify publicly next Thursday before a commission studying government failures leading up to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the panel announced.
Commission members may ask Rice to respond to claims by Richard Clarke, the former White House counterterrorism chief, that President Bush underestimated the threat of terrorism in the months before the attacks, and that the war on terrorism had been hampered by Bush's insistence on waging war on Iraq.
Also Thursday, a top aide to former President Clinton said that only a fraction of the documents the Clinton archives had sent to assist the panel's investigation had been passed on to the commission.
Bruce Lindsey, Clinton's legal representative for records and a longtime confidant of the former president, said the Clinton archive in Little Rock, Ark., had sent 11,000 pages of documents to the White House in response to queries from the commission, but that only 25 percent of those records had been forwarded to the panel. Lindsey said he did not know why the White House retained the remaining 75 percent of the documents.
Response
The White House confirmed Thursday that it had withheld a variety of classified documents from Clinton's files that had been gathered by the National Archives in response to requests from the commission.
White House spokesman Scott McClellan said some Clinton documents had been withheld because they were "duplicative or unrelated," while others were withheld because they were "highly sensitive" and the information in them could be relayed to the commission in other ways.
Al Felzenberg, spokesman for the commission, said the panel was negotiating with the White House to determine the exact nature of the documents being held back.