RELUCTANT WITNESSES.(The Talk of the Town)

From 2002, Lawrence Wright profiles the F.B.I. agent John O'Neill, who died in the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center

From 2002, Nicholas Lemann profiles Condoleezza Rice

After an unusually conspicuous episode of sullenness and stonewalling, the Bush Administration has yielded--a little--to the importunings of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, the ten-member bipartisan panel familiarly known as the 9/11 commission. Last Tuesday afternoon, President Bush appeared at the lectern of the White House press briefing room, quickly read a four-minute statement, and left as reporters called out questions to his retreating back. The statement was an announcement that Bush's national-security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, "will provide public testimony." It added, as if in passing, that Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney "will jointly meet with all members of the commission in a private session."

Bush didn't like the idea of a 9/11 commission to begin with. He fought its creation for a year, until congressional pressure and the indignation of families of the murdered forced him to make a deal. Ever since the commission was established, in November of 2002, the keynote of his relations with it has been grudgingness. He tried to make Henry Kissinger, of all people, its chairman--a Cheney suggestion, which soon foundered on Kissinger's refusal to disclose the names of the clients of his consulting firm. (Kissinger's successor, Thomas Kean, a former Republican governor of New Jersey, has a reputation for moderation and transparency.) It took another year, until November of 2003, for the White House to allow four members of the commission to have a look at the relevant copies of the President's Daily Brief, the intelligence summary that goes to the President and a few other high officials each morning. The commission has at times been forced to beg for funds, thanks to what has appeared to be deliberate Administration foot-dragging. (The commission is budgeted to spend fifteen million dollars, some fifty-five million less than Kenneth Starr & Co. spent on the pursuit of Bill Clinton.) These and other delays, most of them caused by the White House, were such that the commission issued urgent warnings that its task could not be completed without an extension of its deadline, originally May 27th of this year. It recently managed to pry an extra two months out of Bush's allies in the House of Representatives, but only after John McCain and Joseph Lieberman threatened to hold up a highway bill in the Senate.

The Administration's latest concessions are a direct result of the emergence from relative obscurity of Richard A. Clarke, the veteran federal bureaucrat who, in nearly thirty years of extraordinary service in the Defense and State Departments and on the professional staff of the National Security Council, probably learned more, thought more, and did more about terrorism and counter-terrorism than any other public official. In his testimony--before the 9/11 commission, in his book "Against All Enemies," and in hours of television interviews--Clarke has presented a detailed and extremely persuasive narrative of events that differs dramatically from the version preferred by the Administration and its toadies in Congress and the media. The Condoleezza Rice flip-flop represents an admission that the question of whether Bush has effectively protected the United States against terrorism--both before September 11, 2001, and after--is, abruptly, open. "The nation needed thoughtful leadership ...