Questions for Tom Kean - Want to know a secret? (9/11 investigation)

[Dover]

QUESTIONS FOR TOM KEAN
Want to Know a Secret?
Interview by DEBORAH SOLOMON

Published: January 4, 2004


Q - You seem to believe that 9/11 did not have to happen.

Kean - Yes, there is a good chance that 9/11 could have been prevented by any number of people along the way. Everybody pretty well agrees our intelligence agencies were not set up to deal with domestic terrorism. Everybody had been set up to fight the cold war. They were not ready for an internal attack.

Q - Did anyone in the Bush administration have any idea that an attack was being planned?

Kean - That is why we are looking at the internal papers. I can't talk about what's classified. President's daily briefings are classified. If I told you what was in them, I would go to jail.

Q - Are you a friend of the president's?

Kean - I've met Bush, but I know his father better than I know him. Actually, I've discussed 9/11 more with President Clinton. We are friends. We were governors at the same time.

Q - As a former Republican governor of New Jersey, can you genuinely be fond of a Democrat from the South?

Kean - Governors don't have to be political, because we are not competing against one another. When I was chairman of the education commission, Clinton was vice chairman. We became good friends.

Q - Do you feel the 9/11 commission has had full access to the documents you need?

Kean - Yes, but these classified documents cannot move. In order to read them, I have to go to little rooms, which are wired and where cellphones don't work. I always thought a skiff was a small boat. But not in Washington! In Washington, a SCIF (sensitive compartmented information facility) is a room where you keep classified documents.

Q - Are you allowed to photocopy the documents?

Kean - No. The highest-classified documents, I can take notes on. The notes are then kept in the same safe. I can't walk out of the room with my notes. When I want to read them, I have to go back to the SCIF.

Q - But doesn't that defeat the whole point of note-taking?

Kean - This is not my world. I go along with what everyone else goes along with,

..cont'd

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/04/magazine/04QUESTIONS.html