Members of the Sept. 11 commission, fearing that the Bush administration and Congress will never act on some of their recommendations, are joining together almost a year after completing their final report to press the White House for information showing whether the government has done enough to prevent another catastrophic terrorist attack, commission officials said.
The officials said the 10 commissioners, acting through a private group they founded last summer, will present a letter within days to Andrew H. Card Jr., President Bush's chief of staff, asking the White House to allow the group to gather detailed information from the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Pentagon, the State Department and other agencies about the government's recent performance in dealing with terrorist threats.
Commissioners say they want the information to prepare for a series of public hearings scheduled to begin here on Monday and to draft a privately financed report that will evaluate the government's counterterrorism policies in the wake of the commission's final report last July.
The above is from this morning's New York Times, Philip Shenon's "Members of Sept. 11 Panel Press for Information on Terror Risk." Note this from the article as well:
Members of the commission readily acknowledged that they no longer had any authority to force the Bush administration to hand over information or to make witnesses available, and they have no expectation that they will re-create the fireworks of their public hearings last year, when senior administration officials were subjected to hours of often hostile questioning under oath and on live network television. (The hearing on Monday is scheduled to be broadcast live on C-Span 2, the cable network.)
To watch online, go to the C-Span home page. And here's C-Span's description of the program:
Forum
CIA and FBI Reform
9/11 Public Discourse Project
Washington, District of Columbia (United States) ID: 187060 - 06/06/2005 - 2:00 - No Sale
Thornburgh, Richard, Attorney General, Department of Justice
Gorelick, Jamie S., Commissioner, National Cmsn. on Terrorist Attacks
Ragavan, Chitra, Chief Correspondent, [U.S. News & World Report], Legal Affairs
The 9/11 Public Discourse Project, the nonprofit successor organization to the 9/11 Commission, will hold a panel discussion to assess the status of CIA and FBI reform one year after the release of the 9/11 Commission Report.
It starts at 9:30 a.m. EST. It's estimated to last two hours.
The e-mail address for this site is common_ills@yahoo.com.
