9/11 Panel to Review Clinton Papers

The Bush administration agreed Friday to let the commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks review about 9,000 pages of documents from the Clinton archives, which the White House had earlier refused to release, despite the conclusion of federal researchers that they were relevant to the panel’s work.

The agreement, announced by White House spokesman Scott McClellan and confirmed by commission officials, was aimed at cutting short another high-profile battle between the administration and the Sept. 11 panel in the midst of the presidential election campaign. The White House has feuded with the commission repeatedly over access to documents and witnesses, and last week capitulated to demands for public testimony from National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice.

But in comments to reporters in Huntington, W.Va., McClellan declined to say whether the White House would agree to actually hand over any of the disputed documents at issue, raising the possibility of further disputes. Most of the records are highly classified and are directly related to terrorism and national security issues, officials said.

Some commission members said Friday that the lack of disclosure of the Clinton documents raises the possibility that the Bush administration has withheld other relevant records. They said the panel, formally known as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, may need to seek a review of other documents that were produced by individual agencies but not turned over by the White House.

“We can’t afford to have documents that are relevant to our inquiry being withheld on a technicality,” said Jamie Gorelick, a Democratic commission member who served as deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration. “This is not litigation. This is finding facts to help the nation.”

McClellan said: “We have been fully responsive to the commission’s request, and any allegation to the contrary is simply ridiculous.... If the commission now wants to go back and verify that some documents are duplicative or nonresponsive to their request, then we are more than happy to work with the commission so that they can do so.”

The agreement on the Clinton papers comes amid a fierce political debate about the relative counterterrorism efforts of the Clinton and Bush administrations. Former counterintelligence coordinator Richard Clarke has testified that the Bush team was less focused on the Al Qaeda threat than the Clinton administration.

The latest flap erupted after Clinton attorney Bruce Lindsey disclosed that about three-quarters of the nearly 11,000 pages of Clinton papers intended for the Sept. 11 commission had not been turned over to the panel by the White House. Bush administration officials said the documents that were withheld were either duplicates or “nonresponsive” to the specific requests made by the commission.

Lindsey said Friday that, based on final numbers he had received from the archives, the White House turned over 1,966 pages of 10,790 total, or about 18%. Another 90 pages of Clinton documents are also in dispute, but officials were unable to provide further details about those papers Friday.

Clinton’s official papers are government property and are kept by the National Archives and Records Administration in two locations: a warehouse in Little Rock, Ark., and a facility in Washington for highly classified documents. Archives staff combed the records and identified those that they deemed relevant to the commission’s formal requests and sent them to the White House for review.

The commission’s executive director, Philip Zelikow, said staff members have learned of two examples of documents that were not included in the Clinton records that were turned over to the commission but were relevant to the commission’s work. According to Lindsey and other sources, one was a document cited by Lindsey and another was identified by Samuel Berger, the former Clinton national security advisor. Berger’s office said he was unavailable for comment Friday.