Kyle F. Hence
9/11 Families Request Our Help
Fri May 9 18:09:18 2003
208.152.73.98

9/11 Families Request Our Help



Date: Fri, 09 May 2003 16:05:05 -0400
From: "Kyle F. Hence" kylehence@earthlink.net
Subject: 9/11 Families Request Our Help

A founding member of 9/11 CitizensWatch, Allan Duncan
has recieved this request from 9/11 victim family
member Mindy Kleinberg of September 11th Advocates,
widow of Alan Kleinberg who was killed at Cantor
Fitzgerald in WTC Tower One. They are looking for
support in putting pressure on the White House not to
block full disclosure of materials pertinent to the
investigation by the National Commission.
9/11 CitizensWatch and UnansweredQuestions.org wholly
support such a campaign. May it begin in earnest now
and not let up until we have answers to all the
questions raised in the wake of 9/11.

Please forward far and wide. Thank you for doing your
part in working toward accountability and the truth.

Kyle F. Hence
Co-founder
http://www.UnansweredQuestions.org 
http://www.911citizenswatch.org 

To review Mindy's compelling testimony during the
first open hearings held by the National Commission
please visit:
http://www.9-11commission.gov/hearings/hearing1/witness_kleinberg.htm

Mindy's message follows:
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

If you could possibly send this message out to anyone
who wants to help would appreciate it. The article
below talks about the WH looking to exert executive
priveledge on many relevant documents that are needed
in order for the Commission to properly do its
investigation. We would appreciate it if people would
either call or fax a letter to the White House letting
them know that they are outraged by the possibility of
this administration trying to block pertinent
information from getting to the Independent
Commission. Preventing the truth from coming out will
cause this country to remain in
peril.

Sincerely , Mindy Kleinberg

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The White House Phone Numbers

COMMENTS: 202-456-1111
SWITCHBOARD: 202-456-1414
FAX: 202-456-2461

http://www.msnbc.com/m/pt/printthis.asp?storyID=910676


September 11 Showdown
MICHAEL ISIKOFF AND MARK HOSENBALL
NEWSWEEK

An imminent and potentially nasty confrontation over
an independent commission's authority to investigate
the White House's handling of the September 11 terror
attacks was narrowly averted last week--just before
President Bush landed a jet aboard the USS Abraham
Lincoln in a carefully crafted ceremony touting the
toppling of Saddam Hussein as a major victory in the
war on terrorism.

BUT THE BATTLE over the issue is far from over. In
fact, NEWSWEEK has learned, President Bush's chief
lawyer has privately signaled that the White House may
seek to invoke executive privilege over key documents
relating to the attacks in order to keep them out of
the hands of investigators for the National Commission
on Terror Attacks Upon the United States--the
independent panel created by Congress to probe all
aspects of 9-11.

Some commission members now fear a showdown over the
issue--particularly over extremely sensitive National
Security Council minutes and presidential briefing
papers--could be coming in the next few weeks. "We do
think it's important to engage this issue relatively
early--i.e., now," says Philip Zelikow, the executive
director for the commission, who is negotiating with
administration lawyers to inspect documents and
interview senior officials.

Zelikow says he is still hopeful an accommodation can
be reached with administration lawyers and that the
issue is now in the hands of senior officials in the
White House. But he made it clear that the 9-11 panel
has no intention of backing down from its insistence
that it receive full access to a wide range of
material that has never been reviewed by any outside
body--much less made public. "We expect to get what we
need," Zelikow says. "We're not going to go quietly
into that good night."

Zelikow's comments, and even stronger ones from some
commission members, suggest that last week's brief
contretemps over access to transcripts of secret
congressional testimony was only one small flare-up in
a much broader and potentially high-stakes struggle
that could ultimately wind up in federal court.

Just two weeks ago, one commission member, Tim Roemer,
a former Democratic congressman from Indiana, had
sought to read transcripts of three days of closed
hearings that had been held last fall by the House and
Senate Intelligence Committees--hearings that Roemer,
as a member of the House panel, had actually
participated in.

But when Roemer went down to a carefully guarded room
on Capitol Hill to read the classified transcripts--he
says to refresh his memory--he was stunned to learn
that he couldn't have access to them. The reason,
relayed by a congressional staffer, was that Zelikow
had acceded to a request by an administration official
to permit lawyers to first review them to determine if
the transcripts contained testimony about "privileged"
material.

Roemer called the deal "outrageous" and 9-11 family
members victims bombarded the panel with angry calls.
But late Tuesday, White House lawyers relented,
thereby averting an embarrassing public escalation of
the dispute--and inevitable charges of a White House
cover-up--that could well have marred last Thursday's
highly publicized ceremony aboard the USS Abraham
Lincoln in which Bush declared the military action in
Iraq "one victory in a war on terror that began on
September 11, 2001, and still goes on."

But that by no means settled the matter, sources say.
Publicly, the White House has pledged cooperation with
the panel and two months ago chief of staff Andrew
Card even distributed a memo to agency chiefs
instructing them to work with the panel and provide
them access to documents. But privately, talks have
been far more problematic. Thomas Kean, the former
Republican governor of New Jersey who Bush named to
chair the panel, confirmed to NEWSWEEK that in private
talks with White House chief council Alberto Gonzales,
the president's chief lawyer, has already told him
that he "may seek to invoke executive privilege" over
some documents sought by the commission.

Executive privilege is a doctrine traditionally
invoked by all White Houses to keep confidential
briefings or advice given to the president. But the
precise boundaries of the doctrine are hardly settled.
And it is far from clear how a White House attempt to
withhold material from a congressionally authorized
national commission on 9-11 will play out.

Gonzales and the rest of the White House legal staff
are known to feel particularly passionate about the
sanctity of staff advice given to the president--a
view that reflects Bush's and Vice President Dick
Cheney's adamant opinion that internal
executive-branch decision-making should be conducted
without fear of congressional or media scrutiny.
"Those are like the crown jewels--we'll never give
those up," one White House lawyer predicted to
NEWSWEEK recently when asked about presidential
briefing papers that were
likely to be sought by the commission.

But some commission members say it might be
politically difficult for the White House to sustain
that position--especially given the panel's broad
legal mandate to unearth all pertinent facts relating
to the events of 9-11. The invocation of executive
privilege could fuel suspicions that the White House
is stonewalling the panel in order to cover up
politically embarrassing mistakes. "I think they have
got to be worried about this," says one panel member.
"This is a bipartisan commission, and we've got the
family members."

Among the most sensitive documents the commission is
known to be interested in reviewing are internal
National Security Council minutes from the spring and
summer of 2001 when the CIA and other intelligence
agencies were warning that an attack by Al Qaeda could
well be imminent. The panel is also expected to seek
interviews with key principals--such as
national-security adviser Condoleezza Rice and her
chief deputy, Stephen J. Hadley--to question them both
about advice they gave the president and about what
actions they took to deal with the rising concerns of
intelligence-community officials about the Qaeda
threat.

An equally dicey subject, sources say, is the
commission's expected request to review debriefings of
key Al Qaeda suspects who have been arrested--such as
Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Ramzi bin al-Shibh--who
played critical roles in the 9-11 plot. The
intelligence community has treated those debriefs as
among the most highly classified material in the
government, and the Justice Department is stoutly
resisting a ruling by the federal judge overseeing the
Zacarias Moussoui case to make bin al-Shibh available
to the defense.

But commission members argue that they can't possibly
do their job to write an authoritative history of 9-11
if they can't discover what the federal government has
learned from Al Qaeda operatives who know the most
about how the plot was put together.

TERRORISTS? WHAT TERRORISTS?
After his trip to Damascus last weekend, Secretary of
State Colin Powell proclaimed new progress in the war
on terror. The Syrian government, he announced, had
agreed to shut down offices of Hamas and two other
militant anti-Israel groups that the U.S. government
views as violent terrorist organizations.

It is still far from clear how much the Syrians will
actually make good on their promises to Powell. But if
they do, Syria may turn out to be more helpful than
some of the United States' supposed European allies in
the war on terror. Despite renewed pressure from the
Bush administration, the European Union is refusing to
crack down on some of the same organizations on the
grounds that they aren't terrorists--despite their
role in staging suicide bombings against Israeli
civilians.

The issue came to a head late last year, NEWSWEEK has
learned, when Jimmy Gurule--then a top U.S. Treasury
official involved in cracking down on terrorist
financing--asked his counterparts at the European
Union to freeze the assets of six organizations on
Washington's terrorist list. According to a copy of
the list obtained by NEWSWEEK, the targeted groups
included Hamas, two Hamas-related businesses (the
Al-Azsa Religious Bank and Beit al-mal Holdings) and
Hizbullah, as well as two others outside the Middle
East, the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka and the Communist
Party of the Philippines. But in the case of Hamas and
Hizbullah, the European Union refused. The purported
reason: both groups run large-scale social services
and medical operations in the Israeli-occupied West
Bank and Gaza Strip. The Europeans say that they have
no problem going after the terrorist arms of both
outfits--but not the entire group, a distinction that
Washington rejects as meaningless.

At the moment, sources tell NEWSWEEK, the issue is at
a stalemate--one more sign that when it comes to the
war on terror, the perspective in Washington can often
be sharply different than the view in other capitals,
even those of our traditional allies. © 2003
Newsweek, Inc.


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