Date Set for Rice Testimony; White House Retains Clinton Files

Condoleezza Rice, the White House national security advisor, will testify publicly next Thursday before a commission studying government failures leading up to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the panel announced.

Commission members may ask Rice to respond to claims by Richard Clarke, the former White House counterterrorism chief, that President Bush underestimated the threat of terrorism in the months before the attacks, and that the war on terrorism had been hampered by Bush’s insistence on waging war on Iraq.

Also Thursday, a top aide to former President Clinton said that only a fraction of the documents the Clinton archives had sent to the White House to assist the panel’s investigation had been passed on to the commission.

Bruce Lindsey, Clinton’s legal representative for records and a longtime confidant of the former president, said the Clinton archive in Little Rock, Ark., had sent 11,000 pages of documents to the White House in response to queries from the commission, but that only 25% of those records had been forwarded to the panel.

Lindsey said he did not know why the White House retained the remaining 75% of the documents.

The White House confirmed Thursday that it had withheld a variety of classified documents from Clinton’s files, which had been gathered by the National Archives in response to requests from the commission.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan said some Clinton documents had been withheld because they were “duplicative or unrelated,” while others were withheld because they were “highly sensitive” and the information in them could be relayed to the commission in other ways.

“We are providing the commission with access to all the information they need to do their job,” McClellan said.

Al Felzenberg, spokesman for the commission, said the panel was negotiating with the White House to determine the exact nature of the documents being held back.

Rice’s testimony next week may color the way voters view Bush’s handling of terrorism, which the president has made a pillar of his argument for reelection.

The White House had barred Rice from testifying publicly and under oath, arguing that it would violate the principle of executive privilege, under which the president’s advisors were said to report to him and could not be summoned to testify by Congress.

Bush reversed that position Tuesday after pressure from Republican allies, who said the president risked looking secretive about an issue of importance to the nation.

The commission released a statement Thursday, demanded by the White House in return for Rice’s testimony, in which the panel’s 10 members affirmed that her appearance would not set a precedent for future national security advisors and other presidential aides.

“We agree with the observation by the president’s counsel that Dr. Rice’s appearance before the commission is in response to the special circumstances presented by the events of Sept. 11 and the commission’s unique mandate and should not be viewed as a precedent for future requests for public testimony by White House officials,” the statement said.

The bipartisan panel also thanked Bush for agreeing to meet privately with the full commission, instead of only with the chairman and vice chairman, as had been initially agreed.

No date for the president’s appearance has been set, but commission staff members said they expected it to take place after Rice’s testimony.

“These decisions represent a significant contribution by the president to the work of the commission, consistent with our mandate to ‘provide a full and compete accounting’ of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11,” the statement said.