The words of Thomas Kean and Lee Hamiltonare heavy; but then we've seen this movie before, or certainly its closest facsimile--the missing Nixon tapes? Those less than two-dozen minutes of audio tapes, that were apparently destroyed some 35 years ago, brought down a sitting president, through resignation, for the first and only time in American history. Richard M. Nixon avoided his congressional legal fate by quitting.
With but a year to serve, George W. Bush is not likely to face that choice. But for those many hours of CIA interrogation videotapes allegedly destroyed, somebody will pay his due for him. Would that it could be Cheney the Terrible, he with the still strangely Teflon credits with too many of my mainstream journalistic colleagues. But that is pie-in-the-sky wishing. Justice for the low-down most-high? Only in movies and overly ambitious liberal websites is that even imaginable.
The scapegoat that now must be forthcoming, due in no small part to an Op-ed piece in today's The New York Times by Messrs Kean and Hamilton, is likely to hold a significant position in the Bush administration--in name value perhaps not, since almost all of the major names have already left this reeking, foul ship of state.
I have had little time of late to post in these pages for various reasons, some of them very good; but I had to post this item, albeit with at best a cursory introduction, or be forever ashamed of myself.
MORE than five years ago, Congress and President Bush created the 9/11 commission. The goal was to provide the American people with the fullest possible account of the "facts and circumstances relating to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001" -- and to offer recommendations to prevent future attacks. Soon after its creation, the president's chief of staff directed all executive branch agencies to cooperate with the commission.
The commission's mandate was sweeping and it explicitly included the intelligence agencies. But the recent revelations that the C.I.A. destroyed videotaped interrogations of Qaeda operatives leads us to conclude that the agency failed to respond to our lawful requests for information about the 9/11 plot. Those who knew about those videotapes -- and did not tell us about them -- obstructed our investigation.
