Leaders of 9/11 Panel Say Attacks Were Probably Preventable
The leaders of the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks agreed Sunday that evidence gathered by their panel showed the attacks could probably have been prevented.
Their remarks drew sharp disagreement from one of President Bush’s closest political advisers, who insisted that the Bush and Clinton administrations had no opportunity to disrupt the Sept. 11 plot. They also offered a preview of the difficult questions likely to confront Condoleezza Rice when she testifies before the panel at a long-awaited public hearing this week.
In a joint television interview, the commission’s chairman, Thomas H. Kean, a former Republican governor of New Jersey, and its vice chairman, Lee H. Hamilton, a former Democratic House member from Indiana, indicated that their final report this summer would find that the Sept. 11 attacks were preventable.
They also suggested that Ms. Rice, Mr. Bush’s national security adviser, would be questioned aggressively on Thursday about why the administration had not taken more action against Al Qaeda before Sept. 11, and about discrepancies between her public statements and those of Richard A. Clarke, the president’s former counterterrorism chief, who has accused the administration of largely ignoring terrorist threats in 2001.
“The whole story might have been different,” Mr. Kean said on the NBC News program “Meet the Press,” outlining a series of intelligence and law enforcement blunders in the months and years before the attacks.