Demand an Independent Investigation

It was a scene rich in duplicity: W sitting down in the White House last week with his brother Jeb, the governor of Florida, pushing a plan for the federal government to shell out $235 million to buy back oil leases off the coast of the Sunshine State.

This is a guy who was dead set on ripping up the Alaskan wilderness to drill for oil, a president who claims we have to find alternatives here in America so we're not dependent on foreign oil. But what does that all matter when you need to help dear brother keep the state out of the clutches of Clintonite Janet Reno, and, perhaps more importantly, shore up your own standing in the state you'd won (depending on your perspective) by only a few votes? In addition to being a grand act of political hypocrisy, this was nepotism on a scale we've not seen?and crassly flaunted to boot. Bill Clinton, they told us, was the guy who sold out his principles for political gain. Bush was going to bring integrity to the White House. Right. This administration will go to whatever lengths it has to?no matter how blatant it looks?to ensure its power. And that's true whether it's selling out its principles or covering up the events of the worst terrorist attack in history.

That's why we need an independent commission to investigate 9/11. It's just starting to come out in the wash: after the avalanche of outrage that came from the White House against those who even dared to question what the government may or may not have known that could have prevented the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, both the FBI and CIAare admitting that plans for the horrific event could have been detected. After Condoleezza Rice stood before the cameras and said no one could have known that planes would be used to crash into buildings, the FBI now says there were "red flags" and "dots that should have been connected." After a frantic White House pulled low-visibility Dick Cheney out of his undisclosed location to do Larry King Live, where he used words like "outrageous," "unjustified" and "beyond the pale" to describe the White House's critics, FBI Director Robert Mueller is now saying that "we should have had mechanisms in place." After the usually quiet and demure Laura Bush was trotted out and transformed into yet another White House pit bull impugning the patriotism of anyone who questioned her husband, it now seems that the critics are in fact the true patriots, pushing to get to the bottom of the Sept. 11 attacks.

Mueller himself only four weeks ago said under questioning that the FBI could not have prevented the attacks. But he and everyone else among the Bushies have changed their tunes. Sadly, it's not because the Bush administration finally saw the light and understood truth is better than coverup, or even because it caved in to pressure from the critics?most of the Democratic critics in fact backed off, as the Bushies, feigning shock and disgust, used the media to clobber them down. No, the reason the FBI and the Bush administration are now switching the story is because two documents have come to light in recent weeks, documents that this secretive White House, no doubt, would rather have kept under wraps: a memo sent in July by the Phoenix office to FBI headquarters, which warned that Osama bin Laden might be putting terrorists in American aviation schools to train them for attacks; and the Minneapolis letter sent by agent Coleen Rowley, in which she told Mueller and the gang of "circling the wagons."

Rowley charged that FBI headquarters had sloughed off serious information from French intelligence authorities that would have allowed a court to authorize a warrant for Minneapolis agents to search alleged "20th Hijacker" Zacarias Moussaoui's computer files. This information?along with the new revelations of a CIA mishap, as well?only further bolsters calls for an independent commission to investigate what law enforcement and the White House may or may not have known. As Rowley succinctly put, it's time to stop circling the wagons.

The Bush administration should welcome such an investigation; the fact that it does not doesn't necessarily mean it's covering up explosive information that will implicate the President. But just as with Dick Cheney's Enron papers, the Bushies know that the more information that's out there, the harder it is for them to pursue their agenda. And their agenda from day one has been to further consolidate power.

More investigations might show, for example, as the Phoenix and Rowley correspondence indicates, that existing guidelines on fighting terrorism, hammered out over decades to provide a balance between protecting civil liberties and pursuing criminals, are not the problem as much as communication, mismanagement and people asleep at the switch at the very top of the FBI are. As Rowley states, the intelligence information was there for a court to use to speedily authorize a warrant to further investigate Moussaoui. It wasn't necessary for agents to have the ability to do so without authorization?if headquarters had paid attention to the warnings rather than downplaying them.

But the more it's known that mismanagement, rather than a lack of power among agents, is the problem, the more complicated it becomes for Attorney General Ashcroft's ferocious plans to overhaul the Justice Dept. and give federal agents unbridled and dangerous power to act on their own. This kind of government control over people's lives has been the wet dream of a hardline conservative like Ashcroft since long before Sept. 11, and long before he was attorney general.

So it was surely with glee that last week Ashcroft announced he was expanding the FBI's power to spy on Americans, even when there's no evidence of an individual's engaging in illegal activity. On the Today show, Ashcroft disingenuously couched it all in a shockingly innocuous way, as giving agents the power to search the Internet just like the average "teenager" does. But what Ashcroft has in fact done is given the FBI the go-ahead to invade and monitor people's lives?to drop in on chat-room discussions undercover, trace back participants who might be critical of the government and knock on their doors to investigate them further.

By describing these new powers to a fearful public as necessary?and in the most benign way?Ashcroft benefits from the administration's desires to keep all of the reasons why the FBI failed to detect Sept. 11 under wraps. It allows him to imply that the reasons for the failure to detect the impending attack were all about the inability to monitor people as closely as he'd like. More than unearthing some perhaps unknown bombshell, an independent investigation will go a long way toward protecting civil liberties in a dangerous time.

Michelangelo Signorile can be reached at [www.signorile.com](http://www.signorile.com).