Thursday, April 29, 2004
The panel wanted a separate meeting with the president and vice president.
WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney went behind closed doors today to answer questions from members of the Sept. 11 commission who want to know how followers of Osama bin Laden managed to pull off the worst terrorist attack in American history.
The 10 commissioners arrived at the White House at about 9:15 a.m. EDT and gathered around Bush and Cheney, who were seated on chairs near the fireplace in the Oval Office. White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and two members of his staff whom the White House would not identify joined Bush and Cheney in the session, which began sharply at the scheduled 9:30 a.m. appointment time.
"This is a good opportunity for the president to sit down with members of the commission and talk with them about the seriousness with which we took the threat from Al-Qaida, the steps we were taking to confront it and how we have been responding to the attacks of Sept. 11," White House press secretary Scott McClellan said today, shortly after the session began.
"I don't expect a readout on the discussion," McClellan said. "This is a private meeting. ... The discussion from this meeting will be reflected in their final report."
The White House initially opposed the creation of the panel investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that killed some 3,000 people in New York City, Washington and Pennsylvania. Bush and Cheney agreed to answer questions jointly after sparring with the commissioners for months over ground rules for the meeting.
Questions
In the question-and-answer session, Bush faced a familiar challenge: convincing Americans that he responded appropriately to an intelligence system that CIA Director George Tenet said was "blinking red" with warnings of a terrorist strike. Except in this case, he had a very limited audience in a private setting.
The nation's top two elected officials were to be quizzed about why, for instance, the Bush administration didn't make terrorism a more urgent priority, especially after an Aug. 6, 2001, presidential daily brief that, among other things, warned of "patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings."
"Why wasn't it higher, given the threat levels in spring and summer 2001?" says former Indiana Rep. Timothy Roemer, a Democratic member of the commission. Why, Roemer wonders, didn't the Aug. 6 memo cause more people to man "battle stations" in the month before the attacks?
The Bush administration has said it did make terrorism a top priority, and that there was nothing in the memo that specified the type, time or place of an attack on America.
Timing of report
The effect of Bush and Cheney's highly classified Q & amp;A session with the commissioners might not be known until the panel releases its final report, which is due out this summer, about three months before the fall presidential election.
"It's very important because of the timing, just before the election," said James Thurber, director of American University's Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies. "He [Bush] is very strong in the polls on homeland security, and this may undermine it a little bit."
The political stakes would be even higher, though, if the meeting were televised like the commission's recent hearings, said Thomas Mann, an analyst at the liberal-leaning Brookings Institution.
"The president is basically placing his re-election on the argument that he is the commander in chief of the war on terrorism," Mann said. "Anything that calls that into question is potentially damaging. If it were public, he'd be out there with a message, pre-scripted."
Another issue Bush and Cheney are expected to confront is Iraq. Both men have been accused of being distracted by Iraq in the months before Sept. 11, making them inattentive to warnings pointing to a terror attack. In newly released books, Bob Woodward and former White House terrorism coordinator Richard Clarke separately contend that Bush and Cheney were fixated on finding an Iraqi link to the attacks. The administration has denied it.
Republican commissioner Slade Gorton said, "We're going to ask about the pre-9/11 attitudes and policies ... and what took place on 9/11 in terms of response and what each of them did."
According to a commission statement, Tenet told the panel earlier that in his world in 2001 "the system was blinking red," and by late July it could not have been any worse.
"Tenet told us he felt that President Bush and other officials grasped the urgency of what they were being told," the statement said.
Joint meeting
The commission had preferred to meet separately with Bush and Cheney, but the White House wanted the president and vice president to face the commission together. After the administration placed restrictions on holding separate meetings -- only two commissioners could meet with each for one hour -- the commission agreed to the joint meeting in which all the commissioners could meet for an unspecified amount of time with both.
"They need to have one story, and it's easiest to have one story when they're in the room together," Thurber said about the reason he thought Bush and Cheney wanted to be interviewed together. "I don't mean they're trying to distort anything. It's useful to them. It protects them if they're both in the room at the same time."
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