ASHINGTON, May 25 - Members of the federal commission
investigating the Sept. 11 attacks have warned in recent days that the
panel may fail to produce a unanimous final report this summer, with
disagreements most likely over the panel's recommendations for a
restructuring of the F.B.I., the C.I.A. and other counterterrorism
agencies.
The threat of a split, with the possibility of separate majority and
minority reports, is likely to be welcome news at the F.B.I., the C.I.A.
and other intelligence and law-enforcement agencies that have been harshly
criticized by the panel at its public hearings and that are almost certain
to be targets of its final report.
In interviews this week, members of the bipartisan commission said they
would strive to agree on a unanimous report before their congressionally
mandated deadline of July 26. The commission is scheduled to meet
privately throughout June to debate the policy recommendations that will
be the centerpiece of the document.
The commission's chairman, Thomas H. Kean, a former Republican governor
of New Jersey, has repeatedly called for a unanimous report, warning that
anything less could undermine the commission's ability to persuade the
White House and Congress to follow through on its recommendations.
But others on the 10-member commission said in the interviews that as
the work of writing the final report began in earnest, they realized that
a unanimous report might be impossible because so many of the proposed
recommendations were so contentious.
Their comments appeared designed to dampen speculation, especially
among groups of family members of victims of the Sept. 11 attacks, that
the commission of five Republicans and five Democrats would coalesce
around a single set of recommendations for an overhaul of the nation's
law-enforcement intelligence and intelligence agencies.
Panel members have said they will consider several proposals that are
likely to be strongly resisted in Congress and by the Bush administration,
including stripping the F.B.I. of responsibility for domestic
counterterrorism investigations, shifting the responsibility to a new
domestic intelligence agency modeled on MI-5 in Britain and creating a
national intelligence director with budgetary authority over the C.I.A.
and other intelligence agencies.
"Unanimity is a nice goal, but it isn't going to be a necessary goal,"
said Slade Gorton, a Republican member of the commission who is a former
senator from Washington State.
"From a personal point of view, I am not certain that we will be
unanimous on all of the recommendations," Mr. Gorton said. "Just take the
issue of the way we organize intelligence. Reasonable people can differ on
that. I know I've seen some recommendations, some tentative ones, with
which I don't agree.''
Mr. Gorton said the commission's staff had recently presented members
of the panel with a list of possible recommendations for the panel's final
report.
While refusing to describe the recommendations or say which he might
support, Mr. Gorton said that if there was a split on the commission in
the final report it would not necessarily be on partisan lines.
"Certainly, the tentative debates have no split on partisan lines by
any stretch of the imagination," he said.
The commission has prided itself on what it has insisted are
nonpartisan policy deliberations behind closed doors.
The panel's vice chairman, Lee H. Hamilton, a former Democratic House
member from Indiana and the former chairman of the House International
Relations Committee, predicted that the commission would "achieve very
large consensus on the report and the recommendations, but I hesitate to
say unanimity."
"We're going to be dealing with some very controversial
recommendations," Mr. Hamilton said. "My goal would be unanimity. But we
recognize that may not be possible."
Another Democrat on the panel, Bob Kerrey, the former senator from
Nebraska who is now president of the New School University in New York,
agreed that it would be "exceptionally difficult" to produce a unanimous
report.
Mr. Kerrey said that in some disputed areas, like restructuring the
F.B.I. and intelligence agencies, the commission might decide against a
single recommendation and instead present the White House and Congress
with options that reflect differences among the commissioners.
"It may be us saying, 'Look, here are the two most serious options that
we looked at, and here are the reasons that eight of us feel one way and
two of us feel differently,' " he said. "I don't think that's a
failure."
The commission, known formally as the National Commission on Terrorist
Attacks Upon the United States, is expected to produce a final report that
will be hundreds of pages long and will document a long series of blunders
by the F.B.I., C.I.A. and other agencies responsible for the nation's
counterterrorism effort.
While there may be dispute over the panel's final recommendations,
several members said they were hopeful that the commission could agree
unanimously on the part of the report that will detail the history of the
nation's counterterrorism programs and the law enforcement and
intelligence failures that preceded the Sept. 11 attacks.
They said that part of the report would be built on a framework
provided by 14 interim staff reports that the commission has released at
public hearings over the last five months and that have been mostly
praised by members of the commission.
Additional staff reports are expected to be made public next month at
the panel's final hearings.
Mr. Kerrey said unanimous agreement on the wording of the narrative
part of the report would be an important accomplishment and could pressure
the White House and Congress to act on the panel's recommendations, even
if the recommendations themselves did not have unanimous support.
"If we get a narrative that's unanimous, it creates the right sense of
urgency for Congress to act," he said.
