Strategic backfire?

Bush's team wants the ceremonial start of the president's re-election campaign to merge in the public mind with the ceremonial commemoration of the third anniversary of the attacks that killed some 3,000 people and left a hole in the city's heart.

Republicans fully intend to politicize the anniversary. So they cannot legitimately complain if the national commission empowered to investigate the 9/11 attacks asks for more time to do its work. That's more time that would, by necessity, take the inquiry deep into the political season.

The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States has issued three major statements on its progress. All have said the Bush administration is impeding its work by stalling the production of documents needed to probe the worst attack on America since Pearl Harbor.

Last week, the commission issued its first subpoena, to the Federal Aviation Administration....Days before issuing the FAA subpoena, the 9/11 panel had complained that the CIA and the Defense Department still had not turned over "the key policy documents."

...Some White House documents still aren't being provided. The commissioners must settle for hearing the White House staff brief them about their contents. We are to assume the briefings are done in good faith.

...The date was set at White House insistence. Having failed at its first mission - to prevent Congress from ordering an independent probe at all - the Bush administration demanded that it have a brief life span. May was the chosen closing date because that would mean an investigative report, with its potentially embarrassing detail, would come out before the heat of the presidential campaign.

...The commission will fail if it does not have the time and the money to do its job right. It hints, already, at this possibility.

Congress will fail if it is eventually asked to provide these and refuses.

...The repeated and now predictable statements from the commission about barriers to its work lead to only one conclusion. The administration strategy is to run out the clock. article

Tick, tick, tick.

More on 9/11 questions and obstruction to finding the answers.