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The Soviet Union under Josef Stalin was once described as a place where yesterday's weather could be changed by decree. That the public at large had experienced yesterday's weather, and would know that the revised official account of yesterday's weather is false, made little difference: The Soviet state had the power to compel its subjects to accept -- at least, in public -- the government's version of the truth on any subject.
The Bush administration, eager to restrain politically dangerous discussion of prior knowledge of the 9-11 attacks, is trying to pull off the quasi-Stalinist feat of "classifying" inconvenient facts already in the public domain. At issue is an 800-page report compiled by the joint congressional committee investigating the intelligence failures that contributed to that catastrophe.
"Among the portions of the report the administration refuses to declassify are chapters dealing with two politically and diplomatically sensitive issues: the details of daily intelligence briefings given to Bush in the summer of 2001 and evidence pointing to Saudi government ties to Al Qaeda' reported Newsweek for June 2nd. "Bush officials have taken such a hard line, sources say, that they're ...