Okay, this’ll probably start the political arguments again, but anyway:
Will The Commissioners Cave?
Appearing Sunday on ABC’s This Week, Sept. 11 commission chairman Kean fell in line, saying repeatedly that the staff report is only an “interim report.” Not only did he note it is “not finished,” the commissioners themselves have not been involved in it so far and the final report will include whatever “new information” becomes available.It is not hard to see what is coming. On Thursday Cheney told the press that he “probably” had more intelligence information than had been made available to the commission. Commissioner John Lehman, another Republican stalwart, told Meet the Press Sunday “the vice president was right when he said that he may have things that we don’t have. And we are now in the process of getting the latest intelligence.”
Flash back, if you dare, to other “intelligence” promoted by Cheney: the aluminum tubes that turned out not to be suitable for fashioning nuclear materials after all; the mobile “biological warfare labs” that produced nothing more lethal than hydrogen for weather balloons; the infamous report, based on forged documents, alleging that Iraq was seeking uranium in Africa.
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On March 19, 2002, the day the war [against Iraq] began, President Bush sent a letter to Congress in which he said that the war was permitted under legislation authorizing force against those who “planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.” If the staff’s finding that there is “no credible evidence that Iraq and Al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States” is allowed to stand, the Bush administration will be shown to have gone afoul of the Constitution yet again.
