THE MEACHER CRITIQUE
A decisive turn in the transatlantic 9/11 debate came in the late summer of 2003, when the dimensions of the Anglo-American fiasco in Iraq were becoming evident. Michael Meacher had been a close associate of Tony Blair and one of the most prominent leaders of New Labour. He was a member of Parliament, and from May 1997 to June 2003, he had been the Environment Minister of Britain. Other members of the Blair cabinet, such as the former Overseas Development Minister, Claire Short, had quit over the Iraq adventure. Meacher was more courageous and more radical: he called into question the heart of the myth which the Bush administration wanted to foist off on the world. Meacher wrote:
First, it is clear the US authorities did little or nothing to pre-empt the events of 9/11. It is known that at least 11 countries provided advance warning to the US of the 9/11 attacks. Two senior Mossad experts were sent to Washington in August 2001 to alert the CIA and FBI to a cell of 200 terrorists said to be preparing a big operation (Daily Telegraph, September 16, 2001). The list they provided included the names of four of the 9/11 hijackers, none of whom was arrested.
It had been known as early as 1996 that there were plans to hit Washington targets with aeroplanes. Then in 1999 a US national intelligence council report noted that “al-Qaida suicide bombers could crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the CIA, or the White House.”
Fifteen of the 9/11 hijackers obtained their visas in Saudi Arabia. Michael Springman, the former head of the American visa bureau in Jeddah, has stated that since 1987 the CIA had been illicitly issuing visas to unqualified applicants from the Middle East and bringing them to the US for training in terrorism for the Afghan war in collaboration with Bin Laden (BBC, November 6, 2001). It seems this operation continued after the Afghan war for other purposes. It is also reported that five of the hijackers received training at secure US military installations in the 1990s (Newsweek, September 15, 2001).
Instructive leads prior to 9/11 were not followed up. French Moroccan flight student Zacarias Moussaoui (now thought to be the 20th hijacker) was arrested in August 2001 after an instructor reported he showed a suspicious interest in learning how to steer large airliners. When US agents learned from French intelligence he had radical Islamist ties, they sought a warrant to search his computer, which contained clues to the September 11 mission (Times, November 3, 2001). But they were turned down by the FBI. One agent wrote, a month before 9/11, that Moussaoui might be planning to crash into the Twin Towers (Newsweek, May 20, 2002).
All of this makes it all the more astonishing - on the war on terrorism perspective - that there was such slow reaction on September 11 itself. The first hijacking was suspected at no later than 8.20 AM, and the last hijacked aircraft crashed in Pennsylvania at 10.06 AM. Not a single fighter plane was scrambled to investigate from US Andrews Air Force base, just 10 miles from Washington DC, until after the third plane had hit the Pentagon at 9.38 AM. Why not? There were standard FAA intercept procedures for hijacked aircraft before 9/11. Between September 2000 and June 2001 the US military launched fighter aircraft on 67 occasions to chase suspicious aircraft (AP, August 13, 2002). It is a US legal requirement that once an aircraft has moved significantly off its flight plan, fighter planes are sent up to investigate.
Was this inaction simply the result of key people disregarding, or being ignorant of, the evidence? Or could US air security operations have been deliberately stood down on September 11? If so, why, and on whose authority? The former US federal crimes prosecutor, John Loftus, has said: “The information provided by European intelligence services prior to 9/11 was so extensive that it is no longer possible for either the CIA or FBI to assert a defence of incompetence.”
Nor is the US response after 9/11 any better. No serious attempt has ever been made to catch Bin Laden. In late September and early October 2001, leaders of Pakistan's two Islamist parties negotiated Bin Laden's extradition to Pakistan to stand trial for 9/11. However, a US official said, significantly, that “casting our objectives too narrowly” risked “a premature collapse of the international effort if by some lucky chance Mr. Bin Laden was captured.” The US chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Myers, went so far as to say that “the goal has never been to get Bin Laden” (AP, April 5, 2002). The whistleblowing FBI agent Robert Wright told ABC News (December 19, 2002) that FBI headquarters wanted no arrests. And in November 2001 the US airforce complained it had had al-Qaida and Taliban leaders in its sights as many as 10 times over the previous six weeks, but had been unable to attack because they did not receive permission quickly enough (Time Magazine, May 13, 2002). None of this assembled evidence, all of which comes from sources already in the public domain, is compatible with the idea of a real, determined war on terrorism. (Michael Meacher, “This war on terrorism is bogus.” The Guardian, September 6, 2003)
This is by all odds the most powerful critique of the 9/11 myth to come from an elected official in Britain. One senses the spirit of Tony Benn, the indomitable leader of the Labour left, who gave Meacher moral support. As for Claire Short, when asked in an interview if there was any common ground between Meacher’s critique of Blair and her own, she nervously replied that Meacher had taken himself completely “out of the mainstream.”
PAUL HELLYER REJECTS THE US ORTHODOXY
Another high-ranking skeptic on the official US account was Paul Hellyer, who had been Defense Minister and Deputy Prime Minister of Canada in three Liberal Party governments of Pierre Elliott Trudeau. Because of this, he brought the expertise of a top- ranking NATO insider to the question under consideration. Some years later, in 2004, Hellyer told an interviewer: “Terrorism is a terrible thing, but this was a police problem and an intelligence problem. What was wrong with your intelligence? Why didn't you know this was going to happen? You spend billions and billions with spooks all over the world and surely you should have known what was going on. And, so I began to be concerned about that. And then questions were raised by others. Why did the President just sit in the schoolroom when he heard the news? Why did he not acknowledge that he already knew what was going on? As a former Minister of National Defense, when the news came out I had to wonder. Why did airplanes fly around for an hour and a half without interceptors being scrambled from Andrews [Air Force Base]? Isn’t Andrews right next to the capitol?” “With a quick action alert they should have been there in five minutes or ten minutes. If not, as the Minister of National Defense, which in the United States is the Secretary of Defense, I would want to say “why not?” (911Visibility.org, May 27, 2004)
POVERTY OF PHILOSOPHY
If ever the world needed voices of reason and wisdom, it was in the traumatized days after 9/11. There were still persons in the world who aspired to the title of philosophers; were they able to provide humanity with any guidance? The picture was bleak. Jürgen Habermas, the most prominent representative of what remains of the Frankfurt School, was interviewed in New York in December 2001 by Giovanna Borradori. Habermas managed a certain veneer of skepticism; he noted that “if the September 11 terror attack is supposed to constitute a caesura in world history, as many think, then it must be able to stand comparison to other events of world historical impact.” (Borradori 26) He realizes that Carl Schmitt was somehow an issue, and he criticized Schmitt as a “fascist.” (Borradori 42) He was against Samuel Huntington; he regarded Bush’s alleged war on terrorism as “a serious mistake.” (Borradori 34) But when we get to the heart of the matter, Habermas remained imprisoned within the Clarke-Tenet-Powell-Blair-Bush official version, although he was clearly uncomfortable in that prison house of the human spirit. “The monstrous act itself was new,” Habermas observed. “And I do not just mean the action of the suicide hijackers who transformed the fully fueled airplanes together with the hostages into living weapons, or even the unbearable number of victims and the dramatic extent of the devastation….one factor above all seems to me to be relevant: one never really knows who one’s enemy is. Osama Bin Laden, the person, more than likely serves the function of a stand-in …. The terrorism we associate for the time being with the name ‘al Qaeda’ makes the identification of the opponent and any realistic assessment of the danger impossible.” (Borradori 28-29) We see that Habermas, however obliquely, was content to accept the official version. Is terrorism political? “Not in the subjective sense in which Mohammed Atta, the Egyptian citizen who came from Hamburg and piloted the first of the two catastrophic airplanes, would offer you a political answer.” (Borradori 33) I myself was in Berlin on 9/11, and saw how the lurid tabloid press there, led by the Bild Zeitung, attempted to awaken a new sense of guilt in the German population because Atta, the “terror beast,” had lived in Hamburg. Postwar German philosophy had been in many ways a campaign of resistance against the Bild Zeitung and its world outlook; now Habermas capitulated.
Another leading European philosopher interviewed by Borradori was Jacques Derrida, the deconstructionist. Derrida, as always, was obscured by the clouds of his own verbiage. He had the merit of proposing at least one realistic step for the post-9/11 configuration: “What would give me the most hope in the wake of all these upheavals is a potential difference between the new figure of Europe and the United States. I say this without any Eurocentrism.” (Borradori 116) Derrida also sensed that Carl Schmitt was somehow involved. He was well aware that “it was not impossible to foresee an attack on American soil by these ‘terrorists ….’” (Borradori 91) He knew that the guerillas who fought in Afghanistan were trained by the US. (Borradori 95) Derrida commented that the values he thought were important – politics, democracy, international law, human rights – “none of this seems to have any place whatsoever in the discourse of ‘Bin Laden.’” (Borradori 113) When it came to these values, “I don’t hear any such promises coming from ‘Bin Laden,’ at least not one for this world.” (Borradori 114) Again, the unease of the inmate shut inside the prison house of the official version was palpable, but it looked like no jail break would be attempted. Derrida said he used the term “Bin Laden” as a synecdoche, but use it nevertheless he did, and not, for example, “invisible government” or “rogue network.”. From these two examples we might be tempted to conclude that, on the great questions of human progress, European philosophy represented a spent force – but this may be premature.
Probably the leading US philosopher at the moment of 9/11 was the neopragmatist Richard Rorty. In the aftermath of 9/11, Rorty moved into a position of critical support for Bush. A year later, Rorty was perhaps less enthusiastic about Bush, but still focused on the “defense of civilization against terrorism” and “the chances of further attacks.” According to Rorty, “The catastrophes that rich monomaniacs like bin Laden are now able to cause are more like earthquakes than like attempts by nations at territorial aggrandizement or attempts by criminals to get rich. We are as baffled about how to forestall the next act of terrorism as about how to forestall the next hurricane.” (The Nation, October 21, 2002) Al Qaeda is thus a force of nature, which will be buffeting us for many years. This is much inferior even to Habermas and Derrida.
For even the beginnings of a sensible summary, we must go to Trudy Govier out in Calgary, Alberta, in Canada. Govier lists four theories on 9/11: there is the Zion theory, which blames the Mossad; the theory of internal collusion, which asserts that the CIA and the FBI let it happen (sometimes abbreviated as LIHOP, let it happen on purpose); the chickens coming home to roost theory, which explains the attacks as a product of destructive US foreign policies; the Gandhian internationalist theory, which accepts the official version of 9/11 but rejects the aggressive US response; and the Standard Theory, with which we are already amply familiar. Govier’s argument against the internal collusion theory has no rigorous basis in fact or logic, but reduces everything to a matter of personal opinion (in Plato’s sense of opinion as inferior knowledge). “Were the attacks a setup?,” asks Govier. “I doubt it. The idea that US intelligence operatives would collude in such devastating attacks against their own country, including such potent symbols as the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, strikes me as wildly unlikely.” (Govier 127-128) She therefore capitulates to the Standard Theory, with a nod to John Stuart Mill on the importance of dissent. Govier does not mention the more radical approach which is endorsed here, namely that 9/11 was the product of a network of moles inside the US government and intelligence agencies, backed up by covert action teams of expert professionals, seeking to provoke a war of civilizations as a means of shoring up Anglo-American world domination. The acronym for this approach is MIHOP – made it happen on purpose.
Finally, it is worthwhile to note that the entire question of 9/11 remains taboo in American politics. This question may provide the key to the demise to Howard Dean’s presidential campaign in the early months of 2004. Whatever else Dean may have been or not been, he was demonstrably the only Democratic candidate who was willing to make 9/11 and Bush’s conduct in relation to it into a campaign issue. He did so on December 2, 2003 in a radio interview with Diane Rehm on NPR. Dean suggested that Bush’s obsession with withholding documents on 9/11 might be attributable to his having known what was about to happen. “The most interesting theory I’ve heard so far – which is nothing more than a theory, it can’t be proved – is that he was warned ahead of time by the Saudis,” Dean remarked. This was a direct challenge to the heart of Bush’s rationale for re- election – his allegedly sterling performance in the so-called war on terror. It also tended to undermine the bi-partisan group which had been attempting to pin the 9/11 attacks on Saudi Arabia. Dean was walking on a minefield. He went on to say: “Now, who knows what the real situation is? But the trouble is, by suppressing that kind of information, you lead to those kinds of theories, whether they have any truth to them or not.” In the absence of total disclosure, Dean added, such theories will inevitably “get repeated.” He concluded that Bush “is taking a great risk by suppressing the key information that should go in the Kean Commission.” Dean’s acknowledgement that the 9/11 coverup had become a major issue was received with howls of “conspiracy theorist” from some of the corporate media who mentioned it. This incident was soon followed by a concerted campaign of denigration and ridicule against the former Vermont governor from such organs as the Washington Post. Dean, like Torricelli, had violated the oligarchical consensus which demanded silence on the real issues of 9/11.
THE FAILURE OF THE KEAN-HAMILTON 9/11 COMMISSION
The utter failure of the Commission to Investigate Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, popularly known as the 9/11 commission or the Kean-Hamilton commission, requires special attention. The Kean-Hamilton commission came into the world as an orphan. The Bush regime and the Washington oligarchy in general had never desired its creation. They had successfully fabricated and propagated the 9/11 myth, and they saw no need whatever for any further rummaging through the events of that catastrophic day. The creation of the 9/11 commission was due largely to the agitational and lobbying efforts of the 9/11 Families Steering Committee, a body largely composed of New Jersey housewives, the widows of men who had died in the twin towers of the World Trade Center. The most active among these widows was the quartet known as the Jersey girls – Kristen Breitweiser, Patty Casazza, Mindy Kleinberg, and Lorie van Auken. Another group had as its spokesman Stephen Push. After months of trips to Washington to lobby Congress, Kristen Breitweiser was designated by the 9/11 victims’ families to testify in the first public hearing of the Joint Intelligence Committee (JICI) inquiry at the US Capitol. The four widows soon became embittered as they saw that members of Congress and their staffs were determined to avoid the questions that seemed most important to them. They were indignant that the Ashcroft Justice Department had prescribed that “minders” had to be present whenever the JICI interviewed officials from the intelligence agencies, a rather overt form of witness intimidation which was later continued in regard to the Kean-Hamilton Commission.
They also began to notice that the FBI continued to lie systematically, and in the process they became aware of some of the anomalies in the government story. Two of the accused hijackers, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, had been known to US intelligence agencies well before 9/11, and important facts about them had been languishing unused in federal files for 15 months. As the JICI discovered, these two persons had had extensive dealings with a longtime FBI counterterrorism informant based in California. The case was very suspicious.
Since the JICI was mandated to cease its operations upon delivering its report at the end of 2003, the four widows and others began pressing for the board of inquiry which Torricelli had demanded, but which Bush had successfully blocked, during the months immediately after 9/11. This proposal was also stubbornly opposed by Bush, who wanted no further investigation at all.
In May 2002, Democratic Senate Minority Leader Daschle endorsed the idea of an independent investigating commission. There was a diehard group of partisan Republicans in the House who sought to block the probe as long as they could. They were leads by Tom Delay, who ranted that “a public commission investigating American intelligence in a time of war is ill-conceived and irresponsible.” (New York Times, May 21, 2002) This was of course what Bush and Cheney also thought.
The House finally agreed to the bill for a commission on July 25, 2002. Rep. Tim Roemer was the bill’s sponsor, and it was not a coincidence that he was later named to the commission, since he was out of the House and needed a job. After the commission was finally voted up by the Senate in late November 2002, Bush sought to name Henry Kissinger as the commission chairman. With that everyone in Washington knew that the fix was in: the new commission was intended by the establishment to carry forward the coverup, not to discover the truth about what had happened. Kissinger’s old adversary Daniel Schorr was one who said so bluntly, adding that the Bush administration was “desperately anxious” to avoid being pilloried for the obvious intelligence failures of that day. (NPR, November 30, 2002)
The bankruptcy of the 9/11 commission is expressed first of all in the conflicts of interests inherent in the pedigrees of the well-heeled insiders who composed it.
The blueblood former New Jersey Governor Thomas Kean, currently president of Drew University, was on the board of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the National Council of Prince Philip’s and Prince Bernhard’s World Wildlife Fund. He has also been on the board of Amerada Hess Corporation, which has been engaged in a joint venture with Delta Oil of Saudi Arabia. Delta Oil is owned by the bin Mafouz and al Amoudi families of Saudi Arabia, who have been charged at various times with helping to fund al Qaeda – as for example in the $1 trillion lawsuit brought by 9/11 victims’ heirs against Saudi Arabian interests. Kean has been insistently linked to Khalid bin Mafouz, one of Bin Laden’s relatives by marriage. He is on the board of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). This is the so-called Project Democracy, a bi-partisan organ of quasi-autonomous US government subversion of the rest of the world. The NED is in effect the privatized version of the Cold War CIA under Reagan’s Executive Order 12333. This was the mother, so to speak, of the Bush 41 – Poindexter – Oliver North double dealing that history has come to know as the Iran-contra affair. In a 1987 essay entitled “Project Democracy’s Program: The Fascist Corporate State,” I had occasion to observe:
Even in an epoch full of big lies like the late 20th century, it is ironic that the financiers of the Trilateral Commission should have chosen the name “Project Democracy” to denote their organized effort to install a fascist, totalitarian regime in the United States and a fascist New Order around the world. …Project Democracy is fascist, designed to culminate in the imposition of fascist institutions on the United States, institutions that combine the distilled essence of the Nazi Behemoth and the Bolshevik Leviathan. Project Democracy is high treason, a conspiracy for the overthrow of the Constitution. An organization whose stock in trade is destabilization and putsch in so many countries around the world it can hardly be expected to halt its operations as it returns to the US border. For Project Democracy, it can happen here, it will happen here.” (Tarpley 1987 40)
Lee Hamilton may be the all-time champion as regards the sheer number of commissions he has served on. While working on the 9/11 commission, he moonlighted as president and director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a thinly veiled intelligence operation. Hamilton served as congressman from Indiana for 34 years, specializing in the House International Relations Committee, which he chaired. He was also on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and the Select Committee to Investigate Covert Arms Transactions with Iran – better known as the Iran- contra committee, which catapulted Oliver North to notoriety. At that time, Hamilton had commented that indictment or impeachment of Reagan or Bush would not have been “good for the country.” Instead, Hamilton supported the indictment of Reagan NSC director John Poindexter, North, and General Richard Secord, while assiduously protecting both Reagan and Vice President George Bush, the latter of whom had directed every phase of Iran-contra drug-running and gun-running (Tarpley 1992). All in all, Hamilton is 0 for 4 in finding serious malfeasance by top oligarchs in any of the investigating committees or commissions he has worked on.
John Lehman was Secretary of the Navy from 1981 to 1987, during the Reagan-Bush administrations, working with Caspar Weinberger and Frank Carlucci. His current role was that of Wall Street corporate raider in his capacity as chairman of J. F. Lehman & Company, a private equity investment firm specialized in leveraged buyouts. Lehman counts as a Kissinger clone; he got his start as special counsel and member of the senior staff in Kissinger’s Nixon-era National Security Council. He was one of the more accomplished practitioners of psychological warfare among the commissioners, as reflected in his expert baiting of the FDNY representatives during the commission’s last hearings in New York City. Thanks in part to this arrogant performance, the last commission session in New York almost turned into a riot against the 9/11 commission, and the commissioners were no doubt glad to get out of town that day.
Jamie S. Gorelick, a partner of Wilmer, Cutler, & Pickering, was also the vice-chair of Fannie Mae, a purveyor of mortgage-backed securities which was reportedly in deep financial trouble as a result of the Greenspan housing bubble. She had been deputy Attorney General during the Clinton years. Gorelick, who served on the CIA’s National Security Advisory Panel as well as on the President’s Review of Intelligence, counted as a personal creature of CIA Director George Tenet, to whom she displayed fawning deference whenever he appeared for testimony before the 9/11 commission. Her lines of questioning typically tried to deflect guilt and opprobrium away from Langley, and towards such favored scapegoat agencies as the FAA.
James R. “Big Jim” Thompson was a Republican wheelhorse from Illinois, where he had held on as governor from 1977-1991, an all-time record for that state. He was a member of the law firm of Winston & Straw, which finds its niche in defending corporations accused of wrongdoing – among them, Philip Morris, the target of numerous class action lawsuits by tobacco victims. Thompson’s caliber may be most easily gauged from examining his role in overseeing a “corporate kleptocracy” as a member of the audit committee of Hollinger Corporation, the British intelligence front which was mercilessly looted over many years by Lord Conrad Black and his rapacious consort, Barbara Amiel, a self-styled “fascist bitch.” According to a report prepared for Hollinger by former SEC chairman Richard C. Breeden, between 1997 and 2003, Black and his management cohorts steered 95.2% of Hollinger’s gross income into their personal accounts, depriving shareholders of about $400 million of company funds. Black and Amiel reportedly viewed Hollinger as a personal “piggybank.” This neocon power couple, who had played a key role in the Clinton impeachment via their control of the London Daily Telegraph, used the Hollinger corporate jet as their personal property, shuttling among Chicago, Toronto, and vacation spots like Palm Springs and others. One 33-hour junket to Bora Bora alone cost Hollinger shareholders $533,000. Black billed the company $90,000 to refurbish his Rolls Royce, and another $8 million for memorabilia that once belonged to Franklin D. Roosevelt, about whom Black wrote a book. A birthday party organized by Black for Amiel at New York’s La Grenouille cost Hollinger $42,870. Black shoveled $5.4 million to neocon windbag Richard Perle, whom he described as a “trimmer and sharper” in private company emails. In the midst of this bacchanal sat Big Jim Thompson of the audit committee, flanked by former State Department operative Richard Burt. Thompson came in for harsh criticism in the Breeden report for having done nothing to prevent Black’s picaresque looting of Hollinger, which was supposed to be preserved as an asset of the British intelligence community. If Big Jim Thompson could not see the kleptocracy raging around him, how could he be expected to come up with any meaningful facts about 9/11? (Washington Post, September 1, 2004)
Former Senator Slade Gorton worked with the law firm of Preston, Gates & Ellis LLP. He had represented Washington state in the Senate for 18 years, 1982-2000. He himself attributed his appointment to his close personal friendship with GOP Senate leader Trent Lott, who was soon forced to quit his leadership post because of his effusive praise for Dixiecrat segregationist Strom Thurmond of South Carolina. Gorton can be considered the representative of the smoke-filled room of Republican senators who exert decisive influence in the GOP.
Former Indiana Democratic Congressman Tim Roemer was a partner at Johnston and Associates, and a scholar at George Mason University in Virginia. He served on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. He was part of the JICI coverup, and was one of the authors of the House bill which set up the 9/11 commission.
Fred Fielding was a senior partner with the Wiley, Rein, & Fielding law firm. He had been Reagan’s lawyer between 1981 and 1986. He had been associate counsel between 1970 and 1972, and associate counsel between 1972 and 1974. His role as Nixon’s lawyer was such that, after a multi-year probe, investigative journalism students at the University of Illinois declared that Fielding had been the fabled Deep Throat who fed leads to Woodward and Bernstein about Watergate back in 1972-74. At that time Fielding had worked in John Dean’s office.
Former Senator Max Cleland of Georgia was the one possible wild card among the commissioners. He had been defeated in his re-election bid in 2002 by an underhanded Republican campaign of character assassination waged by the shameless Saxby Chambliss. Cleland had attempted to preserve union bargaining rights and job security for the employees of the new Department of Homeland Security, but had been wildly defamed by the GOP attack machine, including the juxtaposition of his picture with that of Bin Laden. Cleland, we recall, had left two legs and one arm on the battlefield in Vietnam. In the current scoundrel time in Washington, he quickly became persona non grata.
Democratic Commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste was a former federal prosecutor from New York City who gained prominence during the Watergate scandal against the Nixon White House in 1973- 74, when he was chief lawyer for the Sam Ervin Senate Watergate Committee. Since then he had been a fixture on the Democratic side of various investigations. Currently a member of the law firm Mayer, Brown, Rowe, and Maw, Ben- Veniste was previously with Weil, Gotshal, and Manges, one of the largest bankruptcy firms in the world, which was reportedly in the process of making some $200 million out of the bankruptcy proceedings of Enron, the company looted by Bush’s top backer of 2000, Ken “Kenny Boy” Lay. In the past, Ben-Veniste had represented the Iran-contra drug smuggler and pilot, Barry Seal.
Commission staff director Philip Zelikow was the director of the Miller Center of Public Affairs and White Burkett Miller professor of History at the University of Virginia. He had previously served as the executive director of the National Commission on Federal Election Reform, chaired by Carter and Ford. Zelikow was one of the editors of The Kennedy Tapes, a collection marked by flawed editorial criteria and thus of dubious value to scholars. Zelikow was co-author with Condoleezza Rice of Germany Unified and Europe Transformed. As a partner with Rice in a book venture, Zelikow thus had a further crippling conflict of interest. He was also the director of the Aspen Strategy Group, a program of the utopian Aspen Institute. He is a Bushman, and was a part of the 2000-2001 Bush-Cheney transition team. Rice, for example, had been accused of covering up for a payment of some $100,000 sent to lead patsy Mohamed Atta by General Mahmoud Afmad of the Pakistani Interservices Intelligence in September 2001, almost certainly at the behest of the CIA. Zelikow was appointed by the Bush administration to the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB) on October 5, 2001; the PFIAB chair at that time was the lugubrious General Brent Scowcroft, formerly of Kissinger Associates. At several points in the investigation, Zelikow was forced to recuse himself, since he had been a part of the actions being probed. In another case, he was interviewed by other representatives of the 9/11 commission in relation to his role in pre-9/11 intelligence. At this rate Zelikow could have simplified the investigation by interviewing himself.
The resident lawyer of the 9/11 commission was David Marcus of the arch-establishment law firm of Wilmer, Cutler and Pickering. One of the clients of this law firm was Saudi Prince Mohammed al Faisal, who was named as one of the three most important financiers of 9/11 in the $1 trillion families’ lawsuit. (Michel Chossudovsky, “Who’s Who on the 9/11 ‘Independent’ Commission,” globalresearch.ca; Joyce Lynn, “The 9/11 Cover-Up Commission,” http://www.communitycurrency.org/joycelynn.html)
Four out of the ten commissioners – Kean, Hamilton, Lehman, and Gorelick – were members of the elitist Council on Foreign Relations in New York City.
As if to document its lack of seriousness, the 9/11 commission was indifferent to a glaring case of perjury that occurred on the part of witnesses testifying under oath. In one session, former FBI Acting Director Thomas Pickard testified that Attorney General John Ashcroft had told him before 9/11 not to provide any more briefings on the terrorist threat, since he was not interested in hearing them. Ashcroft later directly denied that this was true. One of the two, most likely Ashcroft, was lying on a matter of considerable materiality. But the 9/11 commission never acted.
The 9/11 families had expected that at least one of their number would be named as a member of the new commission which they had bludgeoned a very unwilling Washington establishment into setting up. When the appointments came out, the commission was composed of hacks, wheelhorses, and professional insiders from the two political parties. The most the families and their allies could manage was to get Mindy Kleinberg on the agenda for a hard-hitting presentation to one of the early public plenary sessions of the commission. The commissioners listened politely, thanked Ms. Kleinberg extensively, and proceeded completely to ignore the letter and the spirit of her remarks. (New York Observer, September 14, 2003)
The 9/11 commission was never a fighting investigation, like the Church Committee and the Pike Committee back during the Ford administration. The Pike Committee, we must recall, once issued a richly deserved contempt of Congress citation against Henry Kissinger. The only time it looked like the Kean-Hamilton Commission might actually be going somewhere came towards the end of 2003, when Commissioner Max Cleland became indignant about the high-handed arrogance with which the Bush White House was insisting on conducting its coverup. The Commission, which was armed with subpoena power, had chosen to negotiate with Bush about its access to important White House documents, notably the presidential daily briefings about which certain details had come out through the earlier probes. Bush was offering to let two members of the commission see the a pre-censored selection of the sensitive documents in question, in a guarded room, without the possibility of taking notes. Cleland, for whom the defeat at the hands of Saxby Chambliss in the 2002 election still rankled, became indignant with the sort of righteous anger which is so seldom seen in today’s Washington. Calling the Bush proposal “disgusting,” and warning against dirty deals, Cleland forthrightly demanded that all the commissioners be able to see all the documents they wanted and take all the notes they thought necessary. (New York Times, October 26, 2003) If Bush chose to oppose this, then the commission would have to use its subpoena powers, and let the matter play out through the courts – incidentally inflicting maximum public relations damage on the always-surreptitious Bush. Just as it appeared that Cleland and perhaps one or two other commissioners were about to clash with Governor Kean and Congressman Hamilton, it was announced that Cleland would be departing the commission to accept a post on the board of directors of the Export-Import Bank. According to the statute that set up the commission, these two jobs could not be held at the same time. The old warrior’s courage had failed him. Who knows what threats had been issued to secure this outcome?
But Cleland’s departure meant that there was a vacancy on the commission which now had to be filled. This time a group of family activists officially nominated Kristen Breitweiser for the seat being vacated by Cleland. But, in an act of cynical contempt for the families and their sacrifices, Senator Daschle, in whose power it was to nominate a successor, chose instead to name former Nebraska Senator Bob Kerry, currently the head of the New School University in New York City. Kerry was an austerity Democrat and deficit hawk from the right wing of his party who had developed into a very vehement warmonger and xenophobe in the days after 9/11. Subjects like Osama Bin Laden and al Qaeda could evoke from him adamant demands for US military retaliation that bordered on psychotic episodes.
For Kerry was not only a troubled man; he was reportedly a war criminal of the Vietnam era. As recounted by Newsweek correspondent Gregory L. Vistica in his article “One Awful Night in Thanh Phong” (New York Times Magazine, April 25, 2001), one night in 1969 “Kerry’s Raiders” had attacked the small Vietnamese hamlet of Thanh Phong, slaughtering at least 13 civilians, including women, old men, and children. This account, relying heavily on the testimony of Gerhard Klann, one of Kerry’s fellow Navy Seals, recounts how Kerry helped Klann dispatch an elderly Vietnamese man, holding him down while Klann cut his throat with a bayonet. Disturbingly, Kerry reportedly claims nowadays that he does not remember his role in the slaying of the old man. If true, this obviously suggested that his mental equipment was not up to the task of serving on such an important commission. (See also Justin Raimondo, “Is Bob Kerrey a War Criminal? Yes.” http://www.antiwar.com, April 27, 200)
The 9/11 commission was stonewalled by the FAA, JCS, CIA, NORAD, and Homeland Security. FAA and NORAD were so reticent that subpoenas were finally issued to get them to disgorge documents. At first, witnesses before the 9/11 commission were not even sworn in under oath. This changed under pressure from the bereaved families. The administration intimidated witnesses, with minders – overseers from the agency they worked for – present during the testimony at all times to make sure they did not get too talkative. The final report of the 9/11 commission was “vetted,” meaning censored or screened, by the Bush White House.
The apex of interest in the 9/11 commission was the Clarke testimony of April 2004, which resulted in the declassification and publication of Clarke’s famous Presidential Daily Briefing of August 6, 2001 entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US.” This was a document which Rice had claimed contained merely historical data. However, the net effect was to strengthen the myth, not to broaden the horizons of the public. This, of course, was Clarke’s intent. Condoleezza Rice first refused to appear, until public pressure became unbearable. But when she did show up the results were disappointing.
When the 9/11 commission report was released on July 22, 2004, it received the approval of a bi-partisan oligarchical consensus. The ruling elite approved of the coverup, and also approved of the recommendations for structural reform, notably the idea of having a single intelligence czar of cabinet rank to preside over CIA, DIA, NSA, and the rest. In reality, the nation would be better served by keeping the present fragmented system, since it provided a pluralism of opinion, and could not so easily be dragooned in a given direction. What if the intelligence czar were a neocon of the ilk of Feith, Luti, or Schulsky? Under the current system, there was always the chance that one intelligence agency might help the country by investigating the crimes of another intelligence agency. But that seemed to be precisely what the Kean-Hamilton consensus did not want.
There were a few dissident voices in the controlled corporate media. William Raspberry condemned the 9/11 commission report as “a childlike explanation” which managed to avoid any semblance of individual responsibility,” analogous to a child’s saying “The lamp broke.” Raspberry quoted CIA alumnus Ray McGovern of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity commenting that “the whole name of the game is to exculpate anyone in the establishment…why is it that after all this evidence and months and months of testimony, the commission found itself unable even to say if the attacks could have been prevented?” McGovern’s overall estimate of the 9/11 commission itself: “This commission is not representative of America or of the families of those who died in 9/11. It is an archetypically establishment body, consisting of people who, with the exception of a token white woman, look exactly like me. They are all lawyers or politicians or both – and all acceptable to Vice President Cheney, who didn’t want a commission in the first place. The result is facile, mischievous, and disingenuous.” (Washington Post, July 26, 2004)
As a result of the official failure to provide a competent investigation of the 9/11 events, there has been absolutely no accountability or responsibility for what occurred. The JICI and the Kean-Hamilton commission agreed in essence that, although there was certainly an intelligence failure, it was systemic, meaning that no individuals were responsible. In bureaucratic usage, the propositions that everyone was responsible means that in practical terms no one was responsible. The only official of any note whose career seems to have been harmed by 9/11 was the security director of the FAA, and even he was allowed to resign.
In the US Navy, a captain who runs his ship aground is relieved of command, no matter whose fault it turns out to be. In many countries, if the national team does poorly in the World Cup soccer championships, the sports minister must resign. In other countries, if a train wreck occurs, the transportation minister is automatically required to step down. This is the principle of ministerial responsibility, the overall political responsibility of the head of an executive department.
After 9/11, the Bush administration did not observe this principle. Instead, figures like Ashcroft argued in effect that, the greater the disasters that occurred on their watch, the more numerous their failures, the more emergency powers they deserved to be given. Their maxim was “the more I fail, the more dictatorial power I deserve to have.” Ashcroft seemed to think that he was entitled to bungle his way into a dictatorship. Such an arrangement provides a positive stimulus for bureaucrats to be less than zealous in preventing disasters from being visited on the citizens. The principle of ministerial responsibility provides the most rudimentary and the most essential reality principle for government officials: the sure knowledge that if catastrophes take place on their watch, they will be sacked. In an oligarchical system like ours, this is absolutely necessary to create a minimum common interest between security officials and the citizens. The alien neocon notion of martial law abolishes this reality principle by threatening to freeze the failed officials in power as a reward for their own bungling incompetence – or for their treasonous complicity.
The following comments on the Gunpowder Plot of nearly four hundred years ago bear an eerie resemblance to the 9/11 operation: “The determined manner in which this object was ever kept in view, the unscrupulous means constantly employed for its attainment, the vehemence with which matters were asserted to have been proved, any proof of which was never seriously attempted – in a word, the elaborate system of falsification by which alone the story of the conspiracy was made to suit the purpose it so efficiently served, can inspire us with no confidence that the foundation upon which such a superstructure was erected, was itself what it was said to be. On the other hand, when we examine into the details supplied to us as to the progress of the affair, we find that much of what the conspirators are said to have done is well-nigh incredible, while it is utterly impossible that if they really acted in the manner described, the public authorities should not have had full knowledge of their proceedings.” (Gerard 16-17) These comments on the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 are equally applicable to the 9/11 attacks of four centuries later. The Anglo-American financier faction, whose birth was marked by terrorism under James I, has resorted to even more spectacular terrorism in the epoch of its historic decline.
And so we say to all persons of good will: you would never believe the utterances of Bush & Co. about any issue of importance without independently verifying the facts. Why do you persist in believing Bush on the most central question of our time, 9/11?
On September 14, 2001, the US Congress, contemptuously flaunting the lessons of the infamous and fraudulent Golf of Tonkin resolution of August 1964, which had been paid for with the lives of 50,000 Americans and a million Vietnamese, gave Bush carte blanche to wage war, authorizing him to employ “all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations, or persons.” The only dissenting voice was that of Barbara Lee, Democrat of California, who defended the honor of the American people with her superb courage in the face of hysteria. It is Bush’s determination of those who “planned, authorized, committed, or aided” the 9/11 events which we must now examine.
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Notes:
1. Citations from newspapers of the Arab and Islamic world are from Cameron S. Brown, “The Shot Heard Round the World: Middle East Reactions to September 11,” in Middle East Review of International Affairs, vol. 5, no. 4, December 2001.