Facing the Music

I look forward to giving the Commission a chance to question both of us, and it will be a good opportunity for these people to help write a report that hopefully will help future presidents deal with terrorist threats. (President George W. Bush)

President of the United States of America is the most powerful person in our planet. However, the American system of governance is even more powerful. President George W. Bush and the Vice President Dick Cheney testified before the 9/11 Commission on April 29, 2004 and answered the questions that the ten-member Commission asked them.

The administration had initially opposed constituting the 9/11 Commission and kept it on tenterhooks for months. Finally, they (President and the Vice President) gave in and agreed to testify on some privileged conditions. One of the conditions was that the President and Vice President would testify together even though the Commission wanted them to testify separately. They had also stipulated that the hearing would be private and no notes would be taken (hand written notes were allowed).

Secondly, President Bush would also have White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales and the two members of his staff, present at the testimony. According to Yahoo! News, April 29, 2004, “Gonzales will make sure that the ground rules of the meeting are followed, offer legal advice, if requested, and interject himself into the discussion to protect the president and vice president…”

All these conditions, among others, were met and the Commission arraigned itself opposite to the president and vice president on April 29, 2004, in the Oval office. The testimony began at 9-30 a.m. and was over by the noontime. Initial impressions of the testimony were euphoric all around. The President was happy that he had the chance of presenting his side of the story to the Commission in response to their questions and the Commission was elated that the President answered most of the questions himself seeking Dick Cheney’s help only occasionally to supplement his own information. The details of the questions-answers session are not released in keeping with the original agreement. The tête-à-tête material will be used in Commission’s report which will probably be released sometime in July, 2004.

There were speculations and anticipated questions that the Commission could ask the President and the Vice President. There were editorials on the terms of the agreement under which the top executives consented to testify. The New York Times editorial on the morning of April 29, 2004, for example, included, “The idea that the panel may wring from Mr. Bush some comment that may endanger national security is ridiculous. The Commission, led by the respected former Republican governor of New Jersey Thomas Kean, has already heard, in public, from the leaders of the nation’s top intelligence agency, the secretary of defense, and Mr. Bush’s national security adviser. It seems highly unlikely that the president knows secrets more sensitive than they do. If he did, he would certainly be free to go off the record while discussing them.”

Commenting on the administration’s evasiveness, John Borger of the Guardian Unlimited wrote in his report “Bush to face tough questions on 9/11” on April 29, 2004, “Mr. Bush has said that none of the warnings was specific enough for meaningful precautions to be taken. However, one of the commissioners, Bob Kerrey, a former Democratic senator, suggested he would not accept that as an excuse. It won’t work to say that if somebody had told us that 19 [Middle East] men under age of 35 were going to hijack airplanes _ we’d have moved heaven and earth to stop them, Mr. Kerrey told the Los Angeles Times.” Bob Kerrey appeared to be more than satisfied after the hearing with the President’s testimony. According to some reports, President was more forthcoming than before and provided some new answers which were different from the stereotypical ones that he had offered before.

Expressing Timothy Roemer’s views, a Democratic (former Indiana Rep.) member of the Commission, Yahoo! News reported, “Why wasn’t it (terrorist priority) higher, given the threat levels in spring and summer 2001? …why, Roemer wonders, didn’t the August 6 memo cause more people to man battle stations in the month before the attacks?” Yahoo! News also reported, “According to a commission statement, (George) Tenet (CIA Director) told the panel earlier that in his world in 2001, ‘the system was blinking red,’ and by late July it could not have been any worse.” This does not seem to square up with what the administration has been saying all along about such alarms. According to them (Condi. Rice as one for example), such warnings were not specific; they were rather ‘historical’. The administration claims, “it did make terrorism a top priority, and that there was nothing in the memo that specified the type, time or place of an attack on America.” Hopefully, the commission has heard from the president himself whether, in his own vision, the ‘red alert’ reported by Tenet was sufficiently red – or not?

Some political pundits have suggested that the move for constituting the 9/11 commission was not completely apolitical; it has political repercussions due to the election-politics, particularly when the commission’s report is due to be released only a few months before November 4. According to Yahoo! News (April 29, 2004), “It’s (the release of the report) very important because of the timing, just before the election, said James Thurber, Director of American University’s Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies. He (Bush) is very strong in the polls on homeland security, and this may undermine a little bit.”

According to the usual speculations, the Commission probably also enquired about the White House’s priorities – Iraq vis-a-vis terrorism. Both Bob Woodward (Plan of Attack) and Richard Clarke (Against All Enemies) argued that President Bush’s administration was pre-occupied with Iraq and Saddam Hussein and diverted valuable resources from Afghanistan (for fighting al-Qaida) to launch the Iraq war. The entanglement in Iraq, which has grown worse, continues tying these resources in Iraq, which was not linked to al-Qaida before the war. Now, the argument goes, Iraq has become a hotbed of terrorism. In short, the Iraq war has helped increasing worldwide terrorism rather than controlling or reducing it. Was the decision to go on war with Iraq politically wise? This is another question which might have come under discussion under the commission’s probe.

There is nothing ‘perfect’ in this world, including the system of governance in USA. But the checks and balances which are constitutionally provided help in maintaining the ship of governance in somewhat even keel.