9/11 Commission Promises Revelations

ByABC News
August 30, 2004, 2:45 PM

Dec. 18 -- The government's final report on the circumstances surrounding the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks isn't due for another five months, but the man in charge says there already are some revelations.

"I think that there are materials that we've found that will change some of the story that the public now knows about 9/11, in some important ways," Thomas H. Kean, chairman of the 10-member National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, told ABCNEWS' Nightline in an interview airing tonight.

In an interview broadcast by CBS News on Wednesday night, Kean said the report would give "a pretty clear idea what wasn't done and what should have been done. I mean, this was not something that had to happen." He said he believed there were people who should have lost their jobs for failures that allowed the attacks to happen.

In his interview for Nightline today, Kean, a former Republican governor of New Jersey, suggested the commission would not assign blame to senior officials in either of the last two administrations.

"We have no evidence that anybody high in the Clinton administration or high in the Bush administration did anything wrong," he told Nightline's Chris Bury.

However, he said that could change as the panel wraps up its work. "A lot of the conclusions which we will reach having to do with higher officials are going to be reached when we've finished with our job, not now …. It's too early at this point for me or anybody else to say these are the conclusions," he said.

No Rush to Judgment

While the commission's goal is not to point fingers, Kean said those who were to blame were "not necessarily the top people in government."

He said his conclusions are not based on new information. "The evidence I'm talking about is the evidence we've all had for a long time," he said.

Commission spokesman Al Felzenberg earlier told ABCNEWS if the panel was to put out a serious and specific finding, it would hold a press conference. "We're going to avoid a rush to judgment," he said.