Exactly. There’s no perfect way to do it; no unimpeachable panel of wise solons, acceptable to all, that could maintain a perfect sense of decorum. Yet the review needs doing. Hence we get what we got. It could have been worse. It could have been better. Whining about some of the choices made at this late date just comes off as sour grapes.
I don’t think anyone is arguing against the results being used for political purposes - as you say, there’s nothing wrong with that. The argument is that the results themselves will be wrong or at least distorted because of political pressure. Don’t you think that if the real conclusion was that the Bush administration made serious mistakes, that the Republican members of the Commission won’t want to slant or distort that information? Or let’s say they decide that a particular piece of legislation in the 90’s was spectacularly ill advised. If John Kerry voted for that, don’t you think the Democratic members might want to downplay its significance?
You could already see that hapening in the last few weeks. Richard Clarke was treated almost reverentially by the Democratic Committee members. Condoleeza Rice was attacked, filibustered, and lectured to. Do you think a process like that is likely to come out with a reasonable, non-biased interpretation of what went wrong, if anything?
This commission is like holding hearings in 1943, during the war, on who was to blame for Pearl Harbor. Wait a year or two, put the political season behind, and you’re going to have a much better chance of getting a report that bears a close resembence to the truth. But this year? I doubt it.
On the other hand, the Tighty Righty party line seems to want to place the whole blame on liberals tying the hands of the Vigilant Defenders with thier fussy and prissy concerns about “civil rights”. If only our Vigilant Defenders had not been hampered by the effete liberal elites, all would have been well.
To these jaded ears, it rings echoes of the moldering crapola about how Viet Nam could have been a splendid victory, if only the liberal politicians had not crippled the military option.
So lets reveal the names, places and documents, Sam, so that you and I can interpret and distort to our hearts content, hmmm? All of it, anything that cannot be definitely proven to have direct security implications.
Have I a partisan interest? Is the bear Catholic, does the Pope shit in the woods. You betcha. Which is why I want the facts. All of them.
Still, Sam has a point about reviewing matters after a few years have passed and passions cool. This would be the perfect time to form an independent bipartisan commission for the purpose of dishing out the straight dope on Iran-Contra. I wonder if Bush, or Sam would support such an effort?
Poor baby. You know, as someone (maybe Tip O’Neill) said, “Politics ain’t beanbag.” Rice is a volunteer for the job she has; so “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.” The “poor Condoleeza” ploy stinks.
Condoleeza Rice was filibustered? Her main stock in trade was to begin the answer to nearly every question with a long preamble for “background.” This is a well known tactic of people who don’t want to answer questions when they know that the questioner’s time is limited.
Rice’s main answer seemed to me to boil down to the claim that most of the information she received on terrorism she regarded as “background” about which she didn’t have to do anything.
Rice was in a position to see that things got done if she chose to do so. Clarke was not in such a position. All he could do was recommend. So if committee members were harder on Rice than Clarke it’s because of where the responsibility to do something lay. That is if anything could have been done which is one of the things the panel is trying to determine.
And, of course, members of the administration spent quite a bit of time doing their best to denigrate Clarke and his work so if they want to cry about mistreatment of Rice my response would be “don’t tell me your troubles I’ve got troubles of my own,” and “tough shit, go see the Chaplain.”
If we are in a serious war, and if there are substantial problems with intelligence, can we really wait a few years for the turmoil to die down to address them? In two year we’ll be in a Congressional campaign, and we could hardly do something political then, right? If the Commission was either doing a whitewash, or a Bush bad Clinton good hack job, I can see it, but it seems that a lot of new information is coming out.
The intelligence disaster before the Iraq war hardly makes me feel very confident that all the problems were fixed. And I don’t buy the Pearl Harbor analogy - we are hardly in the middle of total war today.
So, given a major catastrophic event in the history of the United States, you’d rather the Congress and the public do nothing, to shield the President and his Administration from “political consequences”? 
“Sorry for y’all who’ve lost loved ones in those terrorist attacks, but finding out what went wrong and how to prevent it has to take a backseat to helping Bush’s chances of getting re-elected in 2004.” This must be some of that new-fangled “compassionate conservatism” I keep hearing about.
Let’s not mince words – everything the President of the United States does has “political consequences.” It’s the nature of the job. If George can’t take the heat, he shouldn’t have stepped into the damn kitchen back in the Republican primaries of 2000.
And at least Clinton had the cojones to take the slings and arrows while his political enemies were looking under every nook and cranny for secret death squads and stained dresses.
Isn’t this whole thread simply a minor variation on the “Bush hater” theme?
The commission starts to make the Bushies look like a bunch of total knobheads, so the Bushies naturally scream “Pay no attention to the commission! They hate Bush!”.
Next the commission will be a left wing circle jerk, and after that the commission will be endorsing blow jobs from Monica. It’s the standard repertoire, and it’s all they’ve got.
It’s causing the Bushies real pain to watch the story unfold. Or unwind. Whatever.
[ul]
[li]Closed doors. Yes, I know that the public has an inalienable right to know everything at all times, except we don’t. If the commision is politically balanced, that will prevent a whitewash. Let all the testimony etc. come out when it’s done. We can be political after the putative quest for truth. [/li][li]Not just politicians. If we’re looking at things like failure analysis, organizational inefficiencies, security systems, intelligence-gathering and -sharing procedures, defense structures, etc, why not have some people who have spent their whole lives working on those things on the committee instead of farty old pols? Just a thought. [/li][li]Minority reports. This may already be in the works, but even if it is, part the danger of a bunch of chummy ol’ boys most of whom know each other being in charge is that there is a tendency to want to build consensus, speak with a unified voice, etc. This tendency is reinforced when you have clearly deliniated party lines from the get-go. Moreover it creates the illusion that we had the commission, which issued the report and gave us the answer. There is no monolithic storyline. I’d rather see independant reports from multiple sources, approaching it from various angles. We can hash our way through them. [/li][/ul]
And sorry, Demo, I’m not a “Bushie.” I will admit to preferring him to the idiot wing of the Democratic party, but then again I feel that way towards idiot Pubs, too.
From Joe Conason’s column posted on Salon.com
"…That old impulse may backfire, as it did on Ashcroft. In his opening remarks – after pompously reminding his audience that he had sworn to tell the truth – the attorney general made a startling assertion that turned out to be false. He insisted that the Clinton administration had never ordered the assassination of bin Laden. In fact, he claimed to have reviewed the previous administration’s authorizations against bin Laden almost as soon as he took office in February 2001.
“Let me be clear,” said Ashcroft. “My thorough review revealed no covert action program to kill bin Laden.” In other words, all the former Clinton officials who had sworn otherwise, including Clarke, must be lying.
A few minutes later, members of the commission dryly informed Ashcroft that he was badly mistaken. Without saying so directly as to compromise classified material, Richard Ben-Veniste and Fred Fielding both indicated that the commission had obtained a 1998 Clinton “memorandum of notification” specifically targeting the al-Qaida chieftain. Evidently the commission staff found this important document among the Clinton papers withheld by the White House until very recently (and disgorged only after a public complaint by Clinton attorney Bruce Lindsey). It would be interesting to find out why that particular item was held back from the commission by White House lawyers. After being told that the “MON” contradicted his accusation, Ashcroft was forced to swallow his words. He ended up promising that “we’ll work to understand that more thoroughly.” …
Too bad we weren’t able to start and finish it before the election year.
From the former head of the intelligence services of one of allies in War on Terror
• U.S. officials were concerned that Taliban supporters in Pakistan’s military would warn bin Laden of pending operations. The U.S. government had information that the former head of Pakistani intelligence, Hamid Gul, had contacted Taliban leaders as a private citizen in July 1999 and assured them that he would provide three or four hours of warning before any U.S. missile launch, as he had the “last time” — an apparent reference to a failed 1998 cruise missile attack on bin Laden.
Pakistan’s just another ally in the War on Terror doing their part.
You don’t understand what Sam has been trying to say for so long!
If you damned liberals would just leave GWB alone and completely without criticism until the war is over, THEN we can take time to think.
But right now, we’re in a [echo effect] war the likes of which mankind has never before seen [/echo effect].
As such, it’s completely wrong to think about what the president is doing, and why.
Good job invoking FDR and WW2, though, Sam. Because these two “wars” are soooo similar. Almost the perfect neocon post. You just need to add in something beginning with “I don’t know why you liberals are being so picky about Bush, after all, Clinton…”.
As you were.
-Joe
The panel seemed to break down on party lines about how to treat Clarke and Rice, yes. But this is not a commission to investigate Clarke and Rice.
Bob Kerrey, for example, has been very tough on everyone, even the Clinton folks. Likewise, I think Lehman has been pretty damn tough on Republicans, as well.
Just to get the contrary evidence out of the way, I don’t think Slade Gorton has been tough on anyone. He just seems to be telling jokes to the commissioners who sit next to him. I’m serious, watch the tapes.
There are a couple of pure politicians and lawyers on the commission, yes, but I think you’re overlooking those with real experience. For example:
A former Chairman of an Intelligence Committee; a former Secretary of the Navy; a former Watergate investigator; a former Counsel to a President; and someone who has served on the Hart-Rudman homeland security commission and the Iran-Contra panel, as well as being chairman of the House Foreign Relations Committee.
I thought it was just me who noiced that there wasn’t much objection to the hearings until testimony that was potentially damaging to Bush came out. Too bad Hannity et al didn’t speak up when the commission was being formed. Didn’t cross their mind I suppose.
I can’t wait until the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s report about the Bush Admin’s use of intelligence to sell the invasion of Iraq comes out. I don’t hear any objections now, but I expect to hear them aplenty in a few months.
Incidently, the US advance action, knowledge, etc. (if any) as to the Pearl Harbor attack wasinvestigated and during the war, at that. Gen. Short and Adm. Kimmel were both relieved of command. There was no hesitancy whatever about assigning blame in WWII. For example, Gen. Lloyd Fredendall was summarily relieved by Eisenhower after the Kassarine Pass failure in North Africa and replaced by Patton.
Sam: here’s a question.
Regardless of the findings of the commission, wouldn’t you agree that the pressure it’s been able to put to bear has revealed quite a number of things that had no business being kept a secret from the American people in the first place? I mean, take the PDB: there was nothing in it about methods, and no information that revealed special sources that could not be revealed: what little that was such was redacted. Isn’t it good that stuff like that gets out. Or is it your opinion, as it seems to have been the Bush administration’s, that the American people should not know this information before having to decide on political matters?
And if the commission is worthwhile if only to shake the tree for information, and I mean, if the White House had Gorelick’s history declassified specifically in order to discredit the work of the commission, then there must be reams of other information that, if it could be declassified for such trivial purposes, should probably no longer be classified anyway. Why all we ahve to do to learn the deepest darkest secrets about someone these days is for them to attack the White House! All of a sudden, all the supposed deep dark too important to reveal to the American rube-- er people, suddenly gets declassified, covert agents get flipped, or some juicy tidbit of previously privaleged national security secret gets throw out into the open. Incomplete and out of context, sure. But at least it’s something.
Look, all we know at this point is that “the 9/11 commission is a joke” became an official Republican spin point as of Wednesday this week, and who’da thunk it, up pops the SDMB thread the next day just sort of speculatively coming to that conclusion and people sort of happening to agree with the idea. We’ll be forming a commission to look into the coincidence, you can be sure.
Presumably, such an SDMB commission must be rigorously non-partisan. I will prepare myself for the clamorous demands for my participation, and will reluctantly consent to serve.
There’s no way the SDMB can investigate itself. It’d only be a waste of hamsters.
Technically it was created in 2002. The legislation was approved Nov. 27th.
When people’s memories will be hazier than they are now? That will be more than 3 years after the events.