Calm at the inquiry front

Lee Hamilton, vice chairman of the commission that will write the history of the September 11, 2001, attacks, seems happy with the White House cooperation he is getting.

Judging from news reports on the commission’s work, you would think the 10-member, bipartisan panel and the White House were engaged in a bitter, combative political struggle, with President Bush and his top aides stonewalling the congressionally mandated inquiry every step of the way.

But that’s not what is happening at all, at least not now, says the former Indiana Democratic congressman and foreign policy veteran widely respected on both sides of the political aisle.

“We’ve gone through a month of negotiations with them, but we have had access to all of the senior officials. I don’t think there has been a single request to interview a single official where we’ve been turned down,” Mr. Hamilton told me.

“Almost all of our requests to see documents have been granted. There may be some very small exceptions to that, but overall we’ve seen the documents we have sought to see,” he said.

“The conditions placed on access to the documents have been subject to a lot of negotiations. We’ve worked through those problems now to our satisfaction,” he said.

In the beginning, of course, there were procedural disagreements over what national security information could be released, under what ground rules, and who in the Bush administration could testify and under what circumstances.

Then came Richard Clarke’s blistering testimony blaming President Bush for doing nothing to fight terrorism in the first few months of his new administration, followed by a no-holds-barred White House counterattack that raised questions about Mr. Clarke’s underlying political motivations.

Two years ago Mr. Clarke was praising Mr. Bush’s handling of the war on terrorism. Now, he was giving fodder to the Democrats in the midst of the campaign.

One of Mr. Clarke’s chief complaints against the president was that the U.S. fought the wrong war. The former counterterrorism adviser’s accusation that the war in Iraq diverted attention from the war on terrorism made a lot of headlines, but “do not consider that to be in the mandate of the commission,” Mr. Hamilton said.

“Our commission is not charged with reviewing the war on terrorism, it is to explain September 11,” he said.

When the smoke cleared from Mr. Clark’s fiery, politically timed accusations — a strategic part of his book-promotional tour that will earn him millions of dollars in royalties — polls showed a majority of Americans still trusted the president to protect America from the al Qaeda terrorists.

More recently, the Democrats tried to make political hay over whether Mr. Bush’s national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, would be allowed to testify.

At the heart of that brouhaha was the age-old checks-and-balances issue: Could a congressionally-legislated inquiry require testimony from someone in the president’s senior staff who provides him with confidential, private advice, without further weakening the presidency’s constitutional powers and prerogatives?

The debate was worth having. The lengthy trail of subpoenas and court inquiries, and congressional investigations, into President Clinton’s many scandals had so weakened the presidency that legal scholars feared the constitutional separation of powers were no longer in balance.

In the end, Mr. Bush solemnly concluded the gravity of the questions raised by September 11 required an exception in this case. In a compromise, the commission submitted a letter stating that Miss Rice’s public testimony today should not and would not set a precedent for future inquiries.

The inquiry, as I reported in an earlier column, is largely seen by Democrats as a political work in progress, one they hope will undermine Mr. Bush’s strength on national security issues. But Mr. Hamilton agrees with another Democratic commission member, former Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey, that the panel’s deliberations have been free of partisan rancor.

“We have had very few votes, none of them have broken on partisan lines. In the hearings, some of the questions have a strong partisan edge to them. But partisanship has broken out more in the news media,” he said.

“Partisanship in the commission has been extremely unusual. By and large, it has operated in a very bipartisan way. Most of us have had some connection to the political world, but I must say I’ve been very impressed with the way the commission has taken on its responsibility.”

After Miss Rice’s testimony, the commission will interview Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney in private. There will be no transcript of those interviews, as far as anyone knows. The agreed-upon ground rules allow the commissioners to bring one note-taker. “We believe we can do our jobs with one note-taker,” Mr. Hamilton said.

Where will this lead? A special congressional committee has already investigated most of the ground the commission is covering, so the question is will its July 26 report reveal something we do not already know about September 11?

Mr. Hamilton is typically candid in his response: “I can’t tell you whether something in our report will be new or not.”

Donald Lambro, chief political correspondent of The Washington Times, is a nationally syndicated columnist.