Congressman accuses 9-11 panel of playing politics

WASHINGTON - House Majority Leader Tom DeLay urged the chairman of the Sept. 11 commission Friday to tone down "partisan mudslinging" by the group's members, saying it could undermine the credibility of the final report.

In a letter to commission chairman Thomas Kean, DeLay said he was troubled by what he believed was "gotcha-style questioning" during the panel's recent hearings with national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and top officials from the FBI and CIA.

"The camera-driven tone of the hearings undermines the commission's credibility, distracts the American people from the gravity of the war on terror and could send dangerous messages to unfriendly eyes and ears around the world," DeLay wrote.

Kean, a former New Jersey governor and a Republican, denied the 10-member panel was politically motivated and said it was committed to a full accounting of the events leading up to Sept. 11. Some of the commissioners' disagreements with witnesses during the hearings were a natural result of open debate, he said.

"Sometimes the public exchanges are pointed, but no more so than in the Congress itself," Kean responded in a letter to DeLay. "Our answer to our critics can only be the quality of our report."

The commission is due to release its final report in July.

DeLay also expressed concerns that Jamie Gorelick, a former deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration from 1994 to 1997, was serving on the commission because she wrote a memo containing instructions for officials to keep counterintelligence "more clearly separate" from criminal investigations.

Kean said he didn't believe Gorelick should resign because she had recused herself from parts of the inquiry covering her time in office.

The Sept. 11 commission's work is stirring controversy in another area. While the commission appears likely to recommend an overhaul of U.S. intelligence agencies, the idea that a separate domestic spy agency be created outside the FBI is meeting strong opposition from current and former officials.

FBI director Robert Mueller, former director Louis Freeh, Attorney General John Ashcroft, his predecessor Janet Reno and CIA director George Tenet all recommended against a new homeland spy agency in testimony this week.

In a rare alignment, the position of the five on the issue dovetails with that of the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU maintains that such an agency could evolve into the ultimate Big Brother, with power to launch covert activities against U.S. citizens, dig into private lives and conduct surveillance without legal cause.

"Even during the most frigid days of the Cold War, we never saw the need to create a secret police force that would work outside the constraints of the Constitution," ACLU executive director Anthony Romero said.

Former Rep. Lee Hamilton, vice chairman of the commission, said it appears Mueller "is moving in the right direction and has made much progress" in building a new intelligence capability at the FBI.

"The key question for us is whether he can succeed with the very difficult mission that he has set out, and we have not come to a judgment with respect to that," said Hamilton, D-Ind.

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