Reply #14: The panel's lone Democrat, Lanny J. Davis, has known Bush since the two were undergraduates at Yale. [View All]

[rodeodance]

The panel's lone Democrat, Lanny J. Davis, has known Bush since the two were undergraduates at Yale. Civil liberties groups regard the Washington lawyer, who worked in the Clinton White House, as likely to be a progressive voice on the panel.

The board also includes a conservative Republican legal icon, Washington lawyer and former Bush Solicitor General Theodore B. Olson, whose wife, Barbara, died in the Sept. 11 attacks. The fifth member is Francis X. Taylor, a retired Air Force general and former State Department counter-terrorism coordinator, who is chief security officer at General Electric Co.

The board members declined to comment for this article. Three referred calls to Dinkins, who referred calls to the White House.

The idea of such a watchdog agency was broached almost immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks, as conservatives and liberals alike saw a need for the government to consider the implications of new and growing anti-terrorism measures.