Schlep to judgment: if anything merited an independent inquiry, it was the attacks on 9/11. But not in Bush's Washington.

• Author: Montopoli, Brian

In January 2002, Dick Cheney placed a series of phone calls to then-Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle. The Senate was preparing to begin limited, closed-door hearings on the intelligence failures that led to the September 11 attacks, and Cheney wanted to warn Daschle that the White House would not take kindly to suggestions from Democrats for a more public inquiry. Over the phone, the vice president implied that calls for wider hearings by Democrats would be met by accusations that they were hampering the war on terror. President Bush repeated the same message soon after, in a closed door meeting with Daschle. In the months following, Democrats, well aware of the credibility gap between the two parties on national security, largely kept their mouths shut.

In May, however, Democrats got some political cover: The families of those killed in the attacks began a push for an independent commission with a much wider scope than the Senate inquiry. "We thought the investigation into our husbands' deaths would be a no-brainer," says Kristen Breitweiser, one of a group of New Jersey widows who banded together to lobby for the commission. "If my husband had been killed in a car accident, there would have been an investigation immediately. This was 3,000 people. We just assumed it would happen." To press the issue, the families went public with their horror stories. In tearful interviews with politicians and members of the press, they produced pictures of their children and recounted stories of final conversations with their spouses. Breitweiser showed lawmakers her husband's wedding band, which had been recovered at Ground Zero, still attached to a piece of his finger. Mindy Kleinherg, another New Jersey widow, told of her conversations with her 11-year-old son in the days after the attack, when the boy insisted that he was willing to take his father back blind, or take him back burnt, so long as he returned.

Meanwhile, the Bush administration continued to argue against the commission. "I think it's the wrong way to go," Cheney told Fox News on May 19. He claimed that national security concerns trumped the families' appeals. Behind closed doors, however, many lawmakers in both parties were outraged by the administration's position. The benefits of a wide-ranging investigation, they said, which would both detail the failures that led to the attacks and make suggestions as to how to address those Failures, would surely outweigh the short-term security concerns trumpeted by the administration. Many believed that the real motivation behind the White House's position was its desire to avoid potentially embarrassing revelations about what it might have done to prevent the tragedy.

It was an understandable strategy. In August 2002, details emerged in the press that the Bush administration had ignored a Clintonera plan to attack al Qaeda in Afghanistan before the terrorist attacks. Despite the emphatic protestations of then-counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke, the administration had put fighting terrorism low on its list of priorities--thanks in part to hostility towards Clarke, a holdover from the Clinton administration. It was later reported that despite the fact that Osama bin Laden had been spotted by Predator drones as many as three times in late 2000, the administration took no action against him. Weeks before the September 11 attacks, Bush was warned that bin Laden's terrorist network might try to hijack American planes, but the administration continued to promote a missile shield, its top military priority, to counteract, as the president put it, "terrorist threats that face us."

For a president who has staked his popularity on his stance against terrorism, a full airing of these revelations had the potential to be politically devastating. Given the choice between a closed-door joint congressional inquiry over which it could wield influence and an independent commission that would be much harder to control, the White House chose to support the former. In July of this year, when the joint inquiry report was finally released, the cleverness of that strategy became clear. The congressional report had all the hallmarks of a whitewash. Because the investigation had been limited to intelligence failures, most of the blame fell on intelligence agencies, not the White House. Bob Graham and Richard Shelby, who had headed up the inquiry, were aggressive in their investigation, but they were largely kept at bay: When the inquiry petitioned the Bush administration for access to National Security Council documents, for example, they were denied and told that the documents were outside the scope of their investigation. Even then, the administration delayed the release of the report for months, and redacted large portions of it, including a section on terrorist ties to Saudi Arabia's government. The final product represented the results of engineering by the Bush administration to produce a report that minimized political damage.

We've come a long way since the 1990s. Back then, it seemed that almost anything, no matter how frivolous, merited an investigation, from Travelgate to Filegate to Vince Foster. In Bush's Washington, almost nothing seems to merit an independent investigation, no matter how serious. How did false statements about Iraq's supposed ongoing nuclear weapons program and connections to al Qaeda wind up in a State of the Union speech by a president arguing for war? Why did top Bush appointees dismiss or ignore warnings by senior military officers that not enough troops were being deployed to safely occupy post-Saddam Iraq? Why was Halliburton, the energy-services firm formerly run by Vice President Cheney, awarded lucrative, no-bid contracts to rebuild Iraq? Who are the two "senior administration officials" who blew the cover of a covert CIA operative specializing in weapons of mass destruction by revealing her name to conservative columnist Robert Novak?

In almost any other era, such alarming questions would have led to immediate independent...