What did the president know and when did he know it? Determining what intelligence was available to the White House in the weeks and months before Sept. 11, 2001, and how that intelligence was acted upon, is one of the most consequential tasks facing the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, the bipartisan congressional commission entrusted with the investigation of the Sept. 11 attacks. The pertinence of this question was only heightened when the White House admitted last year that an August 2001 Presidential Daily Brief (PDB)—a document the CIA presents daily to the President and his top aides—referred to the possibility of al Qaeda’s using hijacked planes in a terrorist operation against the United States. Last week, the Bush administration finally agreed to make the pre-9/11 PDBs available to the investigative panel, but under conditions so restrictive as to prevent the disclosure of information potentially vital to the commission’s investigation.

The terms of the agreement reached by the commission and the President are absurd from start to finish. The 9/11 commission would have access only to selections of the PDB that the White House deems relevant. In addition, only four of the 10 members of the commission would be permitted to view the passages directly; the majority of the panel would have to rely on their colleagues’ notes, which would in turn be edited by the White House.

These conditions place unacceptable obstacles in the way of a full and meaningful investigation into the circumstances of the Sept. 11 attacks. The official rationale behind the decision—that much of the content of the PDBs is irrelevant to the investigation—overlooks two significant problems inherent in such a stringent level of White House censorship. First, context is a crucial issue, as Rep. Tim Roemer, D-Ind., one of two members of the panel to publicly criticize the agreement, noted: “How can you get the context of how al Qaeda or Afghanistan is being prioritized in 10 or 12 pages when you only are seeing two paragraphs?”

More importantly, by granting the White House full control over what portions of the PDBs the commission will and will not see, the agreement allows for the strong possibility that passages that are in fact crucial to the commission’s investigation will be withheld for political reasons. The White House’s professed concerns over the security of the intelligence contained in the PDBs are highly suspicious under the circumstances. The risks involved in providing 10 individuals appointed specifically to handle sensitive intelligence and issued security clearances expressly for that purpose are not readily apparent. The White House’s political interest, on the other hand, in suppressing any evidence that might exist of negligence on its part—the very information that would be most pertinent to the commission’s investigation—would be substantial.

Rather than agree to a meaningless level of access to the PDBs, the 9/11 commission should demand full disclosure from the White House. If the administration refuses to be more forthcoming, the panel should make use of its subpoena powers, which it has already deployed to procure important documents from the Federal Aviation Administration and the Pentagon. The security of high-level intelligence is imperative, but that security is more than sufficiently guaranteed within the auspices of the independent investigative commission. Our leaders must not forget that it is the physical security of the United States that is paramount, and to that end, accountability on the part of the institutions designed to protect the nation is indispensable. When the president signed the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States into law one year ago, he issued a statement charging the commission “to carefully examine the circumstances surrounding the attacks and the lessons to be learned from them.” The truth about those circumstances must not be obscured, lest the lessons be lost.

Dissent: National Security Comes First

The Staff correctly observes that a panel commissioned to investigate the Sept. 11 attacks should have full investigative power. But the President's Daily Briefs contain pages of information wholly irrelevant to the panel's stated purpose. That the White House reserves the power to edit details of intelligence operations in China and North Korea, for example, is a reasonable protection of national security.

The Staff fails to consider Democratic committee members' strong political incentive to spin intelligence information, potentially shaming the Bush Administration for any imagined malfeasance. Aggressive partisan demands for information not germane to Sept. 11 can easily be construed as an attempt to garner political ammunition against Bush. Preserving the integrity of intelligence operations and national security in general must take priority over political bickering.

—Erin M. Kane '05 and Luke Smith ’04