There is, of course, NO partisan witch hunt on at the 9/11 Commission!

And if you believe that, then I have a bridge you'd be interested in buying! Far from the dispassionate search for the truth it has been represented as, this commission has devolved (over the best efforts of the co-chairs, IMO) into an exercise in "gotcha" political theater by the Democrat members thereof.

A fine example was the performance of inquisitor, er commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste, who apparently is intent on reliving the salad days of his youth when serving as an investigator on the Senate Watergate committee. Mr. Ben-Veniste, who apparently sees the new Watergate every morning the sun rises on a White House under Republican management, engaged this past Thursday in this "line of questioning" of National Security Advisor Condaleeza Rice:

Ben-Veniste: Isn't it a fact, Dr. Rice, that the August 6th PDB warned against possible attacks in this country? And I ask you whether you recall the title of that PDB?

Rice: I believe the title was, Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States.

Now, the . . .

Ben-Veniste: Thank you.

Rice: No, Mr. Ben-Veniste . . .

Ben-Veniste: I will get into the . . .

Rice: I would like to finish my point here.

Ben-Veniste: I didn't know there was a point.

Rice: Given that--you asked me whether or not it warned of attacks.

Ben-Veniste: I asked you what the title was.

Rice: You said, did it not warn of attacks. It did not warn of attacks inside the United States. It was historical information based on old reporting. There was no new threat information. And it did not, in fact, warn of any coming attacks inside the United States.

There's only one problem with Mr. Ben-Veniste's questioning (besides the fact that he looked foolish): He either knew, or should have known by simply asking Democrat Senator Bob Graham of Florida, that the information in the now-infamous President's Daily Briefing (PDB) was already well known to Congress, and in any event so old as to be useless as a source of reliable real-time intelligence:

Sen. Bob Graham (D.-Fla.), chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told HUMAN EVENTS May 21 that his committee had received all the same terrorism intelligence prior to September 11 as the Bush administration.

"Yes, we had seen all the information," said Graham. "But we didn't see it on a single piece of paper, the way the President did."

Graham added that threats of hijacking in an August 6 memo to President Bush were based on very old intelligence that the committee had seen earlier. "The particular report that was in the President's Daily Briefing that day was about three years old," Graham said. "It was not a contemporary piece of information."

Graham's comments contradicted combative statements made recently by the Democratic congressional leadership, and confirmed White House assertions that the only specific threats of al Qaeda hijackings known to the President before September 11 came from a memo dating back to the Clinton Administration.

None of this, of course, deterred Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle from flatly contradicting the senior Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee:

"I'm gravely concerned that the President received a warning in August about the threat of hijackers by Osama bin Laden and his organization," said Daschle. "Why was it not provided to us, and why was it not shared with the general public for the last eight months?"

Daschle also asserted that Congress did not have the same information as the White House--implying that the White House alone was to blame for not acting on the information. "I think it is important to emphasize we did not have identical information," he said in a May 16 news conference, in clear contradiction with Graham's statements to HUMAN EVENTS.

On May 22, Daschle again accused Bush of hoarding information, even trying to blame him for the FBI's intelligence failure of September 11. "There is an increasing pattern that I find in this administration that reflects an unwillingness to share information not only with us but within their own administration," he told reporters.

As for the notion that the Congress would have rallied around the President had he taken aggressive action in the absence of an attack: Well, Evie, your supposition in an earlier post is right on.

In addition, a HUMAN EVENTS survey of lawmakers found that few--even among Republicans--would have been willing to act decisively on threats of hijacking by Muslim extremists. Not one Democrat surveyed would countenance the idea that President Bush, upon learning of the al Qaeda hijacking threat, should have suspended the visas of young men visiting from nations that are al Qaeda hotbeds--even though this measure would likely have prevented the attacks of September 11.

Few support that action even now, after September 11, when new warnings of attacks by al Qaeda have been issued by FBI director Robert Mueller and Vice President Cheney.

But the Democrats, of course, deny that Presidential politics have no bearing on their statesmanlike behavior. Hogwash! (fill in your own stronger expletive here)

Paul