They'll claim the questioning is partisan anyway
Panel May Avoid Partisanship in Public Questioning of Rice
By PHILIP SHENON
WASHINGTON, April 7 — The leaders of the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks urged the panel's members on Wednesday to try to avoid partisanship in their public questioning of Condoleezza Rice, President Bush's national security adviser, whose long-awaited sworn testimony could alter the public's view of her, the Bush administration and the commission itself, panel officials said.
They said that at a final strategy session before the hearing on Thursday, the panel's chairman, Thomas H. Kean, the former Republican governor of New Jersey, and Lee H. Hamilton, a former Democratic House member from Indiana, asked the other eight members of the panel to try to avoid questions that suggested partisanship and that could undermine the public perceptions of the commission's work.
Both men have said they are concerned about the appearance of a partisan split created at last month's testimony by Richard A. Clarke, President Bush's former counterterrorism director, who was harshly questioned by Republicans on the panel after he said that the Bush administration — and Ms. Rice, in particular — had largely ignored terrorist threats before Sept. 11, 2001.
"In a very difficult atmosphere, in a town that is the most polarized I've ever seen, the commission is trying to do a job for the American people that is, to the best of our ability, nonpolitical," Mr. Kean said in an interview with The Associated Press.
In a statement after its meeting on Wednesday, the panel also disclosed that it had identified 69 documents from the Clinton White House that needed to be turned over the commission by the Bush administration, which acknowledged last week that it had not turned over 10,800 pages of Clinton administration files gathered by the National Archives.
