Morning Show Wrap, by ABC News Political Unit

N E W Y O R K, July 19, 2004 &#151;<br> -- A product of Noted Now and The Note

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Leads

ABC led with Martha Stewart, CBS led with fires and floods, NBC led with the coming 9/11 Commission report raising new questions about who is to blame.

Appearing from the Fleet Center in Boston, Vanessa Kerry, the daughter of Sen. John Kerry, previewed the interactive design of the Democratic convention's stage for NBC, CBS, Fox and CNN.

9/11 Commission Report

Lisa Meyers reported that NBC News has learned that the 9/11 Commission report is silent on the judgment of whether 9/11 could have been prevented.

Meyers noted that the report criticizes President Clinton for failing to retaliate for the attack on the USS Cole and that it criticizes President Bush for failing to galvanize the bureaucracy in the summer of 2001.

ABC's Pierre Thomas reported on "Good Morning America" that the 9/11 Commission's report chronicles "failure after failure." Thomas highlighted the findings about Iran, saying that there's not evidence the Iranian government knew about 9/11 beforehand. "Still the report raises troubling questions. Iran is a much more well-known, well-established and persistent support of terrorists than Iraq ever was."

On NBC's "Today," President Clinton's former CIA Director James Woolsey defended the Bush Administration's decision to go to war with Iraq. In response to Katie Couric's comments that the 9/11 Commission's report downplays the connections between Iraq and Al Qaeda, Woolsey directed her attention to the Senate's report which, he said, "has far more details about the Iraqi-Al Qaeda connections, particularly in Chapter 12. People ought to go over that with some care." Given the new evidence about Iran's ties to Al Qaeda, NBC's Katie Couric asked Woolsey if the US invaded the wrong country. Woolsey argued that the invasion of Iraq, which he said he prefers to think of as the "freeing" of Iraq, "didn't hinge on whether Iraq was involved with 9/11 itself." Woolsey said it was the general connection with terrorist groups by Saddam's regime, work of one kind or another on weapons of mass destruction programs, and the terrible record he had. "After all, we went to war twice with Milosevic in the 1990s, and he killed about 10 percent as many people as Saddam Hussein." Woolsey said the creation of a national director position "may be a wise move," although objected to the title "national intelligence czar": "I think 500 years of stupidity followed by Bolshevism is not a good" idea.