9/11 Panel Rejects White House Limits on Interviews
    By Philip Shenon
    The New York Times 
    Wednesday 03 March 2004 

     WASHINGTON, March 2 - The independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks is refusing to accept strict conditions from the White House for interviews with President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney and is renewing its request that Mr. Bush's national security adviser testify in public, commission members said Tuesday. 

     The panel members, interviewed after a private meeting on Tuesday, said the commission had decided for now to reject a White House request that the interview with Mr. Bush be limited to one hour and that the questioners be only the panel's chairman and vice chairman. 

     The members said the commission had also decided to continue to press the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, to reconsider her refusal to testify at a public hearing. Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney are expected to be asked about how they had reacted to intelligence reports before Sept. 11, 2001, suggesting that Al Qaeda might be planning a large attack. Panel members want to ask Ms. Rice the same questions in public. 

     "We have held firm in saying that the conditions set by the president and vice president and Dr. Rice are not good enough," said Timothy J. Roemer, a former Indiana congressman who is one of five Democrats on the 10-member commission. 

     Mr. Roemer said that former President Bill Clinton and former Vice President Al Gore had agreed to meet privately with the full bipartisan commission, and that Samuel R. Berger, Ms. Rice's predecessor, would testify in public. 

     "It's very important that we treat both the Bush and the Clinton administrations the same," he said. 

     The White House has declined to discuss details of the limitations it has sought on the interviews with Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney but has said the administration wants to cooperate fully with the commission, known formally as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States. 

     A spokesman for the National Security Council, Sean McCormack, said Tuesday that the White House believed it would be inappropriate for Ms. Rice to appear at a public hearing as a matter of legal precedent. "White House staff have not testified before legislative bodies," Mr. McCormack said. "This is not a matter of Dr. Rice's preferences." 

     Even as panel members warned of a possible confrontation with the White House, there was fresh evidence that the commission had averted a showdown on Capitol Hill. Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, Republican of Illinois, said Tuesday that he planned to shepherd a bill granting the panel a 60-day extension for its final report. Mr. Hastert had vowed to block the extension. 

     Mr. Hastert met Tuesday with the commission's chairman, Thomas H. Kean, a Republican and a former governor of New Jersey, and the vice chairman, Lee H. Hamilton, another former Democratic congressman from Indiana, and said at a news conference later that he would try to secure House approval of the extension, a proposal already accepted in the Senate. 

     With the extension, the commission would have until July 26 for its final report. The panel had warned that if it was held to its original deadline of May 27, as mandated by Congress, it would be unable to complete a full investigation and would have to curtail public hearings. 

     Mr. Hastert denied suggestions from Congressional Democrats that he had tried to block the extension as a favor to the White House, given Republican fears that the report might embarrass President Bush during his re-election campaign. Mr. Hastert said he had no direction from the White House. 

     "I didn't want it to become a political football," Mr. Hastert said of his initial opposition to the extension, adding that he had been chagrined when the White House said in February that it would back the extension. 

     Referring to the commission, Mr. Hastert said he had changed his mind last week "after it became apparent that they couldn't get their work done." 

     Commission officials said that if the White House continued to insist on limitations on the interviews with Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, there might be little that the panel could do to force the issue and that the commission might have to accept the White House's terms. 

     And they said that despite internal conversation about the possibility of issuing a subpoena for Ms. Rice's public testimony, that move was unlikely. Ms. Rice provided several hours of private testimony last month and has suggested that she is willing to answer additional questions behind closed doors. 

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