WASHINGTON, May 25 (UPI) -- Until the body of missing intern Chandra Levy was discovered Wednesday, the big story in the nation's capital was the developing debate over what President Bush knew about the Sept. 11 terror attack, when he knew it and what, if anything he did about it.
Breathless news anchors and screaming tabloid headlines were the order of the day, suggesting, if not declaring, that the president knew the attack was coming and did nothing to prevent it.
The Washington blame game seems to be back for a whole new season.
Actually, it never really went away. In spite of the post-attack paeans to bi-partisan cooperation in the face of a common enemy, the partisan sniping simply became more subtle, at least where the war was concerned.
Politicians of both parties and pundits of all stripes were quick to hide behind these expressions of loyalty to national interest as a shield against any and all allegations. There were a few opinion shapers who were bold enough to raise the rhetorical flag against the U.S., but they were in the small minority and, in many cases, seeking to ratify their own outsider self-image by siding, if not with the terrorists exactly, then by engaging in calls for national self-examination.
When a few Democrats in Congress suggested as the dust from the attack cleared that the president had not been bold enough in the immediate aftermath, most Democrats quickly moved to distance themselves from the observation. The Republicans dismissed the comments as partisanship, wholly inappropriate in such a time of national crisis.
The Republicans were not immune from misguided efforts to exploit the post-attack environment, linking too many things to some aspect of Sept. 11 and the need to enhance the country's national security.
As one example, the White House tried very hard to link the president's proposal for limited oil exploration in a flat, barren part of the Arctic National Wildlife Refugee to the war against terrorism.
It is no doubt true that increased domestic oil production and exploration, as at ANWR, would reduce the nation's dependence on imported oil from the Middle East. It is a bit more than a stretch to suggest, as some on the pro-exploration side did surreptitiously, that a vote against the proposal was a vote against reducing our dependency on foreign crude and therefore unpatriotic in this time of conflict.
If there were few who were willing to attack the issue head on, there were plenty of indirect assaults on the president's leadership. A number of congressional Democrats repeatedly complained they were being left out of the conduct of the war against terrorism and the military campaign to drive the Taliban from power.
In what must have been a singularly embarrassing moment, Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., harped on his exclusion from administration efforts designed to insure the continuity of government should the executive branch be decimated in a single attack -- that is until he learned two important facts: One, the Senate Majority Leader is not part of the order of presidential succession; two, that Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., who as the current president of the Senate pro tempore is, had declined an offered briefing.
With all the facts in evidence, the veneer of legitimate concern with which Daschle's covered his complaints was stripped away, leaving the distinct impression that partisanship rather than statesmanship had been the goal.
What disappeared after Sept. 11 was not partisanship, it was the label. The tone was slightly more muted where national security was concerned, but the tactics continued on as before.
The all-too-public hand wringing of the last week equally smacks of partisanship.
Sept. 11 has been cast, if even for the moment, in an altogether different light.
The discovery of a memo from a Phoenix agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation warning of Muslims at U.S. flight schools, the knowledge that the subject of new al Qaida attacks may have been broached, however obliquely, in a presidential intelligence briefing, and the discovery of a Congressional Research Service report warning of the possible use of airlines to deliver explosive payloads intend to topple office towers combined to create an impression that the administration may have known of the attack before it occurred and could not -- or perhaps even did not -- stop it.
From last Friday into the weekend, congressional Democratic leaders solemnly posed the "what did the president know and when did he know it" questions. This, as an aside, was a tactical error as they themselves later realized as evidenced by their quick withdrawal from the position.
Had they asked at the start, as they are now doing, what had been missed, ignored or otherwise overlooked and why, they might have pierced a hole in the presidential armor. These are important points and the questions they raise must be answered. The current debate is over the best mechanism through which to do that.
The initial question, however, smacks of an effort to imply and to pin blame for the attack directly on President Bush. This may or not be unfair or uncalled for; it is certainly motivated by partisan concerns and the desire to peel a few points off the record over 75 percent approval numbers that he registers in public and private polling.
This is a tactical error. The American people, for the most part, cannot and will not accept the idea that the president would so callously fail to prevent such an attack if he knew it was coming.
The suggestions made by Rep. Cynthia McKinney, D-Ga., and a limited number of others aside -- that the attack generated substantial financial benefits for presidential friends and supporters thus was not stopped -- most people will not believe that any president would consign so many to their deaths if it was in his power to prevent it.
The current insinuations are about establishing -- or even suggesting -- blame for partisan benefit. This is, of course, in stark contrast to the days immediately following Sept. 11.
At that time, many Democrats engaged in very public moralizing about the importance of eschewing efforts to establish internal blame for the attack. The Republicans were in general agreement -- as evidenced by the president's refusal to fire CIA Director George Tenet, a Clinton holdover, and make him a scapegoat for the whole thing.
Liberal pundits and Clinton partisans echoed each other, saying it was more important to move ahead, stay focused and make sure that nothing like the attack every happened again on U.S. soil.
Of course, this was at a time when they may have believed that it was their friends and allies who were on the hook and whose failures would be exposed by an investigation.
Now that there are hints, and that is really all that they are, that the administration may have been able to do more in a general sense to stop al Qaida, the Democrats are eager to revisit the blame question -- because they believe it is now the president and his much-vaunted national security team can be tagged as incompetent at best.
The lead congressional Democrats, Daschle and House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., who have been unable to pull together a substantive inquiry inside the Congress, have signed off on an independent commission to investigate where and how the U.S intelligence apparatus may have failed.
Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss., the GOP leader, and House Speaker Denny Hastert, R-Ill., could also have been more aggressive in getting the Congress to work on an investigation. For its part, the White House opposes an effort outside the regular channels of government, citing its fear that sensitive information might leak.
If such a commission is eventually constituted, it should be safe to say it will only escape the "partisan" label, as those who are come off poorly in its final report are bound to label it, if it thoroughly examines the Bush and Clinton record on these matters.
It is a sure bet the administration's activities from Jan. 20, 2001, forward will be thoroughly examined. Here are four other things that they can look at:
--Did the Clinton administration, as posited in the British press, refuse to meet with representatives of the Sudanese government who wanted to turn over to the U.S. important al Qaida personnel in its custody?
--Did internal directives initiated by Clinton CIA Director John Deutch block agency efforts to consort with and infiltrate suspected terrorist groups to learn their plans?
--Did the much-ballyhooed Gore commission on aviation security deliberately, as one commission member later charged, tone down its final recommendations in exchange -- as others have alleged -- for contributions to the Democratic National Committee and to the Gore campaign?
--Was the highly publicized U.S. attack on a Sudanese pharmaceutical plant and terrorist camps in Afghanistan deliberately timed to distract attention from Monica Lewinsky's testimony before a federal grand jury?
These are not pleasant questions but they have been raised and debated by responsible people. It is as important to know if these things are not true -- and an independent commission could tell us -- as it is to know if they are true.
The rumors of incompetence and corruption in the national security arena, directed at either the Bush or Clinton administration, undermines the ability of the country to wage war against a common foe -- the terrorists who seek to kill the innocent in an act of partisanship more extreme then anything Tom Daschle or Trent Lott could ever say on the Senate floor.
