Timing of report on 9/11 troubling

The commission investigating the September 11 terrorist attacks should wait until after the presidential election to issue its final report to avoid partisan rancor, a key panel Democrat said yesterday.

“It’s very difficult to examine what went wrong, during a presidential campaign,” said Bob Kerrey, a former Nebraska senator.

“I wish the administration had given us an extension beyond the election,” Mr. Kerrey told CBS’ “Face the Nation.”

National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice is scheduled to give public testimony to the commission on Thursday, which will create a “struggle” to contain “partisan firestorms,” Mr. Kerrey said.

President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney are scheduled to appear jointly before the commission in the next two weeks to give closed-door testimony, but commissioners yesterday declined to reveal the date.

Former President Clinton and Vice President Al Gore also will give separate testimony in the next few weeks.

Mr. Kerrey said it would be inappropriate for the current commander in chief and vice president to testify in public or under oath.

John Lehman, former Navy secretary and commission member, also said on CBS that Miss Rice has the overall viewpoint they need to establish the facts.

“Our investigations have now nailed down so starkly that we had an FBI that couldn’t penetrate the domestic cells, that didn’t share information,” Mr. Lehman said.

“We had a CIA with a total aversion to covert activities, that had no capacity to penetrate al Qaeda, that was not set up really for transnational enemies. We had a State Department that was issuing visas to indicted terrorists like Khalid Shaikh Mohammed,” Mr. Lehman said.

Former Rep. Lee Hamilton, Indiana Democrat and vice chairman of the commission, agreed the problems faced by government agencies were systemic in nature.

“The more I look at it, the more I see kind of systemwide problems, rather than individual responsibility. That doesn’t mean the commission will not make criticisms,” Mr. Hamilton said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

The 19 hijackers “defeated every single defensive mechanism we had up on the 11th of September 2001, and they defeated it utterly,” Mr. Kerrey said.

“Our Department of Defense, our FBI, our CIA, our FAA, the INS, I mean, every three letter acronym in Washington, D.C., where there’s billions of dollars being spent, was defeated on 11 September and defeated absolutely utterly,” Mr. Kerrey said.

“It wasn’t even a close call. So the question is, how did that happen? There was a significant amount of warning that al Qaeda was a threat. And in my view, my questioning will be to Dr. Rice, ’You say there wasn’t a plan in the Bush administration; I think there was a plan.’ The problem was, neither President Clinton nor President Bush put that plan into effect,” Mr. Kerrey said.

Former New Jersey Gov. Thomas H. Kean, a Republican and commission chairman, said the panel will finalize its report in July, but that it will not be released to the public until vetted by the White House.

Sensitive intelligence reports will be redacted, but Mr. Kean said the White House review will not change the report’s contents.

“We’re not going to let them distort our report,” Mr. Kean said.

Mr. Kean also said it is unlikely that the White House will stall the report’s public release until after the election.

“Nobody has any interest in having the report sitting around Washington during the election period and pieces of it leaking out. So I think it is in the White House’s interest, our interest, everybody’s interest to get this out in July. And I believe they will,” Mr. Kean said.