dawkins writes:

So the "deal" has been struck! The White House will get to edit documents the 9/11 panel requests before they are released to the commission's representatives.

A Democrat on the panel who has criticized the accord, former Representative Timothy J. Roemer of Indiana, said in an interview that he believed that the panel had agreed to terms that would let the White House edit the reports to remove the contexts in which the intelligence was presented and to hide any "smoking guns."

"The President's Daily Brief can run 9 to 12 pages long," Mr. Roemer said. "But under this agreement, the commission will be allowed to see only specific articles or paragraphs within the P.D.B.'s. Our members may see only two or three paragraphs out of a nine-page report."

Good enough.

Plus, the White House will also get to review and edit any notes that commission officials take on the limited pieces of information they're allowed to see.

Commission officials have said that under the agreement the panel will be able to designate four members to read the reports. They will be allowed to take notes on the documents, and the White House will be allowed to review and edit the notes to remove especially sensitive information.

Cool.

So I say, without being allowed to see anything of any substance, the commission from this point is within its rights to conduct the proceedings with full recourse to Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeldian Iraq war logic.

Remember all the Iraqi missiles and bombs that the Bushies (over-)estimated Saddam had before the current war, but are now nowhere to be found? Well, because they're unaccounted for surely doesn't mean they don't actually exist. Rather, it means they do exist, but we've just not found them yet.

(Rummy's line: "The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.")

So in this case, we mustn't take the White House-orchestrated absence of any evidence suggesting the White House knew more about 9/11 then it admits as evidence that there was absence of such knowledge. Rather, it only proves there's much more to this than meets the eye… really dastardly, damning stuff too!

After all, since we haven't found any WMDs in Iraq, it only means that the Iraqis were that desperate to hide them. And that means there are tons of WMDs still out there, that damn Saddam and the Iraqis to culpability for the whole mess.

And likewise, since the 9/11 commission won't find any information about what the White House knew about 9/11, it only reasonably means that the Bushies are that desperate to hide any such information. And that means there is tons of information still out there -- Mass Destructive information, if you will - that damns Bush and the White House to culpability.

I guess the commission's already done its job pretty well!

Fun footnote:

Administration officials have acknowledged that they are concerned that intelligence reports received by Mr. Bush in the weeks before 9/11 might be construed to suggest that the White House failed to respond to evidence suggesting that Al Qaeda was planning a catastrophic attack. The White House acknowledged last year in response to news reports that a copy of the Daily Brief in August 2001 noted that Al Qaeda might use hijacked planes in an attack.

This is a little reminiscent of the Rehnquist-Thomas-Scalia-Kennedy logic used in 2000 to prevent the Florida recounts from going forward.

Since allowing the recounts to go forward would have caused "irreparable harm" to Bush (since in all likelihood allowing the recounts would have shown that he had lost the election), the Supreme Court was not going to allow that to happen.

Now, since letting President's Daily Brief materials out would show that Bush knew about 9/11 and failed to act, thereby causing "irreparable harm" to his reputation as the hero of 9/11 (among other things), the White House is not going to let that happen.

Let us rue the day that evidence should ever "construe to suggest" the truth!

--dawkins