February 4, 2004 - Mr. Bush wants the facts. He wants to know what led up to the terrorist attacks against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. He wants to know what intelligence failures caused the administration to miss the mark on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. But he doesn’t want to know the facts too soon. That is why he hasn’t been willing to give the Keane Commission studying the intelligence failures preceding 9-11 attacks the 90 day extension it asked for from the May deadline for its report. He will support extending the life of the commission to 2005 however.

He is willing to appoint a 9 member commission to conduct an independent and leisurely assessment of US intelligence operations in Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. It too would not report until 2005. He also wants the facts about who leaked the fact that Ambassador Wilson’s wife was a covert CIA operative. But he did not want those facts enough to either conduct an internal Whitehouse investigation announcing the results or to press his Attorney General to act promptly. With any luck at all Grand Jury secrecy rules will keep those facts bottled up until after the election.

Unfortunately for Mr. Bush there is another commission studying these same facts. It is made up of you and I and all the rest of the citizens who will sit in judgment on Mr. Bush and his administration and announce their findings on November 2. That commission of voters will evaluate the facts as presented to them and in their forum there is no presumption of innocence. Nor are their investigators, the free and uncensored press, restrained from seeking out the truth and disseminating it to the millions who will sit in judgment during the coming months.

Mr. Bush says he does not want the political process to taint the findings of fact reached in any one of the cases. He would, understandably, rather that the facts upon which his stewardship should be judged remain unrevealed until after the judgment has been made. By suppressing the facts until after the election he only gives credence to the inference that he and his administration fear the facts, and with good reason.

You can be sure that somewhere within the administration Mr. Bush has his own Daniel Ellsberg or Deep Throat, someone whose sense of duty to the American people transcends his sense of loyalty to party. No matter how deeply inconvenient political facts are buried they have a way of rising to the surface at the most inconvenient of times as they have twice in the last 4 decades to the chagrin of two of Mr. Bush’s predecessors. When they do it is the effort to suppress them that exacerbates their political significance.

Should Mr. Bush continue with his policy of denial, deferral, and diversion evidenced in his attempt to blunt the Kay revelations by broadening the scope of his commission’s inquiry and delaying its conclusions he will himself etch the image into the public consciousness that his administration and his party consists either of a coterie of cynical dissemblers or a gathering of naïve fools easily manipulated by the servants of the PNAC.

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Update:

Today Scott McClellan, the Whitehouse spokesman, announced that Mr. Bush would urge Congress to extend the 911 Commission deadline to July 15th. Perhaps he is feeling the heat. Whether that is enough time for the commission to find the facts will depend on whether the administration stops stonewalling the investigation. If the present stalling tactics persist an additional 60 days won’t matter – the commission will still be unable to issue a report in which the people can have confidence. Has Mr. Bush finally figured out that you can’t fool most of the people most of the time?