Zeroing in on One Classified Document

[The Backlash Cometh]

When the Washington investigative machinery gets rolling, it takes a major event to stop it. National security adviser Condoleezza Rice's defense of the Bush anti-terrorism effort at yesterday's hearing before the 9/11 commission was not enough.

But while the hotly anticipated hearing -- a sometimes testy affair played out live before television cameras in a room packed as tight as a rush-hour Red Line train -- did not end the scouring of the Bush administration, it helped to narrow the focus to this: What did President Bush and his senior advisers know in the summer of 2001 about a flurry of terrorist threats picked up by intelligence services, and what did they do about it?

That piece of the puzzle remained in dispute in part because of questions about a key classified document that detailed terror threats to Bush about a month before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Commissioners called on the White House to make the document public, which seems certain to keep the investigation in the headlines.

In his blockbuster testimony two weeks ago, former counterterrorism chief Richard A. Clarke leveled two basic charges. The first has receded: that the Bush administration ignored his plans for disrupting the al Qaeda terror network in early 2001, plans that included possible military action against the Taliban in Afghanistan. Rice and the commissioners spent little time on that indictment because Clarke himself undercut it when he said it would not have prevented the attacks.

Instead, they sparred over Clarke's second charge, that top officials, including Bush and Rice, were listless in the face of the summertime "threat spike." Rice insisted that she and the president did all they reasonably could to address "frustratingly vague" threats despite being hobbled by long-standing legal and bureaucratic barriers.

That did not satisfy all the commissioners.

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A62481-2004Apr8.html