WASHINGTON, Sept. 13 - As Congress prepares to take its first tentative steps toward evaluating the government response to Hurricane Katrina, Democrats and others are pressing for an independent inquiry, saying lawmakers cannot be trusted to assess their own complicity in the failures.
"I don't think the Congress can investigate ourselves," Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democrat of New York, said Monday.
Mrs. Clinton, a chief proponent of forming an outside commission similar to the one that investigated the Sept. 11 attacks, is seeking a vote Wednesday on creating such a panel.
Members of the Sept. 11 commission will echo that call on Wednesday when they release a new privately financed study that will cite failures in the federal response to the storm to argue that the government remains unprepared to deal with a catastrophic terrorist strike on American soil.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/14/national/nationalspecial/14cong.html