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Wanna know what really happened leading up to 9/11 and what our government knew? Or even more importantly, what to do in the future to prevent such a horrendous act?

Well, our Congress, over objections from the White House, created a commission, led by Thomas Kean, former Republican governer of New Jersey, to investigate all aspects of 9/11. As has been reported for many months, it seems as if the White House is withholding documents requested by the commission. Some think that this is stonewalling, to let the commission's time run out (deadline for a summary report is May '04), and to prevent a complete analysis of what went wrong back in Sep. '01.

From today's New York Times comes this article about the progress of the 9/11 commission.

Some key quotes from the article:

"These are documents that only two or three people would normally have access to," Kean said. "To make those available to an outside group is something that no other president has done in our history.

"But I've argued very strongly with the White House that we are unique, that we are not the Congress, that these arguments about presidential privilege do not apply in the case of our commission," he said.

"Anything that has to do with 9/11, we have to see it ó anything. There are a lot of theories about 9/11, and as long as there is any document out there that bears on any of those theories, we're going to leave questions unanswered. And we cannot leave questions unanswered."

And this from Max Cleland, former Democratic Senator from Georgia, who also sits on the committee:

"It's obvious that the White House wants to run out the clock here," he said in an interview in Washington. "It's Halloween, and we're still in negotiations with some assistant White House counsel about getting these documents ó it's disgusting."

He said that the White House and President Bush's re-election campaign had reason to fear what the commission was uncovering in its investigation of intelligence and law enforcement failures before Sept. 11. "As each day goes by, we learn that this government knew a whole lot more about these terrorists before Sept. 11 than it has ever admitted."

What indeed did our government know leading up to that aweful day?

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