In a comment below, Len suggests the reason Bush and Cheney insist on testifying before the 9/11 Commission together is so they can coordinate their memories. Ron Hutcheson elaborates further:
As anyone who has ever watched a cop show knows, witnesses and suspects are best grilled alone to expose any inconsistencies in their stories.
“Get ’em alone, keep ’em alone, and don’t even let them talk to each other immediately after, if you can help it,” former New York police detective Robert Louden said Wednesday, recalling the tactics he used during his 21 years on the force. “In an ideal world, you want them separated.”
But Louden, who now teaches at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, said normal rules don’t necessarily apply to a case involving the president.
Bush insisted on the joint appearance in agreeing to take questions from all 10 members of the panel investigating the Sept. 11 attacks. He initially had offered to meet only with the commission’s top two members, former New Jersey Gov. Thomas Kean, the chairman; and former Rep. Lee Hamilton, the vice chairman.
No date has been set for the tag-team testimony. The arrangement virtually eliminates any possibility of divergent answers from Bush and Cheney, and lets Bush pass off any question he’d rather avoid and makes it impossible for the commission to ask either man any follow-up questions.
Speaking of memory, it Richard Clarke’s is looking better and better as more facts emerge. And those who attempted to question his credibility are looking, well, discredited:
On Sept. 11, 2001, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice was scheduled to outline a Bush administration policy that would address “the threats and problems of today and the day after, not the world of yesterday” — but the focus was largely on missile defense, not terrorism from Islamic radicals.
The speech provides telling insight into the administration’s thinking on the very day that the United States suffered the most devastating attack since the 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor. The address was designed to promote missile defense as the cornerstone of a new national security strategy, and contained no mention of al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden or Islamic extremist groups, according to former U.S. officials who have seen the text.
The odd thing is that in and of itself, Clarke’s “scoop”–that terrorism wasn’t an urgent Bush administration priority prior to 9/11–is largely already factored into the electorate and probably doesn’t have a huge political impact. Voters are willing to give the government some leeway in not anticipating the extent of the al Qaeda threat. But this administration is so obsessed with image management that they go all out on the war path against anyone who dares question their carefully-crafted myth.