Rice in Pressure Cooker (sorry...)
I don't expect the Bush team to back away from their refusal to allow Condi to testify in public and under oath before the 9/11 commission, but I'll bet they wish they could. They continue to insist so strongly that it's a matter of constitutional principle (though no one seems able to actually articulate the problem convincingly), that to change course now would be an obvious bow to pressure, and admission that there was not so much principle at work after all. I'm sure they didn't expect the pressure to continue to mount as it has.

"Rice's television, radio and print interviews only reinforced calls for her to testify under oath and in public to the bipartisan 10-member commission, which is investigating the 2001 attacks that killed about 3,000 people. . . .

But with the firestorm over Clarke drawing voter attention in an election year, even Republicans question the wisdom of shutting the public out of what Rice has to say about the attacks that prompted U.S.-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. 'We think, in a tragedy of this magnitude, that those kind of (White House) legal arguments are probably overridden,' commission chairman Thomas Kean, a former Republican governor of New Jersey, told Fox News Sunday."

I think it's come down to this: the White House has no real choice but to acknowledge that the President was not focused on the terrorist threat in an urgent way, because he said as much to Bob Woodward. What Rice said on "60 Minutes" tonight is that no enhanced sense of urgency would have led to any different policy, or any different actions, so it wouldn't have mattered.

"ED BRADLEY: The chairman of the joint chiefs of staff at that time says you pushed it to the back burner. The former Secretary of the Treasury says it was not a priority. Mr. Clarke says it was not a priority. And at least, according to Bob Woodward, who talked with the president, he is saying that for the president, it wasn't urgent. He didn't have a sense of urgency about al Qaeda. That's the perception here.

CONDOLEEZZA RICE: Ed, I don't know what a sense of urgency - any greater than the one that we had, would have caused us to do differently."

If the Commission wants to make a real difference and penetrate the spin from both sides, this is the policy issue they should address. The White House has ridiculed Clarke's insistence that regular cabinet-level meetings on the subject may have "shaken things loose." They say this obssession with meetings accomplishes nothing. I think Clarke makes a convincing case otherwise. If I could ask questions, they would be about that.