corrente

"The Mystery Deepens"
Here's what the brainiacs on the editorial board of The World's Greatest Newspaper (not!) can't understand:

The Bush administration's handling of the bipartisan commission investigating the 9/11 tragedy grows worse — and more oddly self-destructive — with each passing day. Following its earlier attempts to withhold documents from the panel and then to deny its members vital testimony, we now learn that President Bush's staff has been withholding thousands of pages of Clinton administration papers as well.

This latest distressing episode followed the White House's pattern of resisting the commission in private and then, once the dispute becomes public, reluctantly giving up the minimum amount of ground.

it is astonishing that it would still withhold anything that did not pose an immediate and dire threat to national security. The American people would like to know that they have a government that freely gives information to legitimate investigations on matters of grave national interest, not one that fights each reasonable request until it is exposed and forced to submit. The White House is serving no public purpose by acting less interested than the rest of us in having this commission do its vital work. Its ham-handed behavior is also gravely damaging the entire concept of executive privilege.
(via The Times)

Tut tut!

Pshaw!

For shame!

Readers, can anyone help the Times editors solve this mystery?

NOTE: FWIW, my speculation is that the heart of the mystery is in the PDBs (Tom, back). My guess: Condi passed on a PDB, probably when Bush was on vacation, which said that AQ would use airplanes as missiles (a well-known fact anyhow, back), and that Bush either initialled the PDB or added some annotation that would prove that he read it. This would explain why Bush won't even give the commission copies of the PDBs.