ASHINGTON, Nov. 6 — The White House has offered to
provide a federal commission with limited access to Oval Office
intelligence reports regarding the Sept. 11 terror attacks, but some
members of the panel have described the offer as inadequate and are
renewing the threat of a subpoena, commission officials said on
Thursday.
They said the issue of a subpoena would be discussed on Friday, and
possibly decided, at a meeting of the 10-member panel, which was created
by Congress last year to investigate intelligence and law-enforcement
failures before the attacks.
It will be the first formal meeting of the panel since its chairman
issued a warning last month that he was prepared to subpoena the highly
classified documents if the White House did not make them available.
Panel members are trying to obtain copies of the daily Oval Office
intelligence report that President Bush received in the weeks before Sept.
11, 2001. The report is known as the President's Daily Brief and is
distributed to Mr. Bush and a handful of his top aides every morning.
Officials said the White House, under pressure of the subpoena threat,
offered over the last week to make copies of the intelligence briefing
available to the commission's Republican chairman, Thomas H. Kean, the
former governor of New Jersey, and Democratic vice chairman, Lee H.
Hamilton, a former House member from Indiana.
Commission officials said at least three other members of the panel
believed that the White House offer was inadequate and planned to press on
Friday for the commission to consider subpoenaing the White House for the
documents.
The official said the commission would also weigh subpoenas on Friday
against the Defense Department and Central Intelligence Agency for
information that has so far been withheld from the panel.
A Democratic member of the panel, Jamie S. Gorelick, a deputy attorney
general in the Clinton administration, said in an interview on Thursday
that she believed the panel was in an "endgame" with the White House over
access to the Oval Office documents.
Ms. Gorelick would not describe the negotiations between the commission
and the White House but said the panel was determined to have access to
all White House intelligence reports that might relate to the attacks.
"It's absolutely critical to our inquiry," she said, "and we are
amenable to reasonable conditions."
Ms. Gorelick said White House efforts to withhold the documents were a
"mistake."
"It makes people think that there's something really nefarious in those
documents," she said.
The possibility of a subpoena was raised last month by Mr. Kean when he
said publicly that the commission needed access to all intelligence
reports that related to the attacks, including the most highly classified
intelligence reports that reached President Bush in the Oval Office.
The White House has repeatedly said it wants to cooperate fully with
the commission, the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the
United States. Scott McClellan, the White House spokesman, said on
Thursday, "We continue to work closely and cooperatively with the
commission to make sure they have the information they need to do their
job."