9/11 Panel Quizzes Bush, Cheney for Hours

WASHINGTON – President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney answered questions for over three hours Thursday from Sept. 11 commissioners trying to learn how followers of Osama bin Laden pulled off the worst terrorist attack in American history.

The 10 commissioners gathered around Bush and Cheney, who were seated on chairs near the fireplace in the Oval Office for an extraordinary behind-closed-doors meeting that was off-limits to all but White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and two members of his staff.

Lee H. Hamilton, Democratic vice chairman of the bipartisan panel, who had a previously scheduled appointment to attend, and commissioner Bob Kerrey, a former Democratic senator from Nebraska, were seen leaving the White House around noon.

Bush was to make an early afternoon statement about the session in the Rose Garden.

White House press secretary Scott McClellan called the meeting a “good opportunity for the president to sit down with members of the commission and talk with them about the seriousness with which we took the threat from al-Qaida, the steps we were taking to confront it, and how we have been responding to the attacks of Sept. 11.”

“This is a private meeting,” he said. “The discussion from this meeting will be reflected in their final report.”

The White House initially opposed the creation of the panel investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that killed some 3,000 people in New York City, Washington and Pennsylvania. Bush and Cheney agreed to answer questions jointly after sparring with the commissioners for months over ground rules for the meeting.

In the question-and-answer session, Bush faced a familiar challenge: convincing Americans that he responded appropriately to an intelligence system that CIA Director George Tenet said was “blinking red” with warnings of a terrorist strike. Except in this case, he had a very limited audience in a private setting.

The nation’s top two elected officials were to be quizzed about why, for instance, the Bush administration didn’t make terrorism a more urgent priority, especially after an Aug. 6, 2001, presidential daily brief that, among other things, warned of “patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings.”

“Why wasn’t it higher, given the threat levels in spring and summer 2001?” says former Indiana Rep. Timothy Roemer, a Democratic member of the commission. Why, Roemer wonders, didn’t the Aug. 6 memo cause more people to man “battle stations” in the month before the attacks?

The Bush administration has said 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.

Relatives of the Sept. 11 attacks say they hope the commissioners ask Bush and Cheney whether the administration was inattentive when intelligence warnings in the summer of 2001 increasingly pointed to a domestic attack, and whether the government’s emergency response on Sept. 11 too slow.

“The purpose is not to lay blame, but to assess possible reforms,” said Kristen Breitweiser of Middletown, N.J., whose husband, Ronald, was killed in the World Trade Center.

The effect of Bush and Cheney’s highly classified Q&A session with the commissioners might not be known until the panel releases its final report, which is due out this summer, about three months before the fall presidential election.

“It’s 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 it a little bit.”

The commission had preferred to meet separately with Bush and Cheney, but the White House wanted the president and vice president to face the commission together. At the administration’s request, the meeting was not being electronically recorded, but members of the commission and White House staff were allowed to take detailed notes. The commission’s interviews with former President Clinton and former Vice President Al Gore were recorded.

After the administration placed restrictions on holding separate meetings – only two commissioners could meet with each for one hour – the commission agreed to the joint meeting in which all the commissioners could meet for an unspecified amount of time with both.