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9/11 Commission

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The Commission's seal

Template:Sep11 The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, also known as the 9/11 Commission, was set up in late 2002 "to prepare a full and complete account of the circumstances surrounding the September 11, 2001 attacks", including preparedness for and the immediate response to the attacks.

The Commission was also mandated to provide recommendations designed to guard against future attacks. Given its significant importance in investigating one of the most important events in American history and providing recommendations to defend the U.S. against future terrorist attacks, some have compared the Commission to that of the Warren Commission of 1963–1964 in its mammoth global and national significance.

Chaired by former New Jersey Governor Thomas Kean, the Commission was comprised of five Democrats and five Republicans. The Commission was created by Congressional legislation, with the bill signed into law by President George W. Bush.

The Commission's final report was a lengthy book, based on extensive interviews and testimony. Its primary conclusion was that the failures of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) permitted the terrorist attacks to occur and that had these agencies acted more wisely and more aggressively, the attacks could potentially have been prevented.

After the publication of its final report, the Commission closed on August 21, 2004.

Members

The members of the Commission were:

The members of the Commission's staff included:

  • The Commission's Executive Director was Philip D. Zelikow, and the Deputy Executive Director was Christopher Kojm. Daniel Marcus was the General Counsel.
  • Al Felzenberg served as the commission's spokesman.[1]

President Bush had initially appointed former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to head the commission, but he withdrew shortly afterward because he would have been obliged to disclose the clients of his private consulting business.[2]

Past and present government officials who were called to testify, under oath, before the Commission included:

President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, former President Bill Clinton, and former Vice President Al Gore all gave private testimony. President Bush and Vice President Cheney insisted on testifying together, while Clinton and Gore met with the panel separately.

Report

File:911report cover MEDRES.jpg
The cover of the final 9/11 report, which can be purchased in bookstores across the United States and around the world
Main article: 9/11 Commission Report

The commission issued its final report on July 22, 2004. After releasing the report, Commission Chair Thomas Kean declared that both Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush had been "not well served" by the FBI and CIA [1]. The commission interviewed over 1,200 people in 10 countries and reviewed over two and a half million pages of documents, including some closely-guarded classified national security documents. Before it was released by the commission, the final public report was screened for any potentially classified information and edited as necessary.

Additionally, the commission has released several supplemental reports on the terrorists' financing, travel, and other matters.

Criticisms

Main article: 9/11 Commission Report

Because the investigation was controversial and politically sensitive, many participants have been criticised during the process. Leading critics include members of the 9/11 Family Steering Committee and the Jersey Girls, who were instrumental in overcoming government resistance to establishing the 9/11 Commission in the first place, according to the documentary, "9/11: Press for Truth".

Most of the complaints fit into the following categories:

Claims of bias within the commission

Some members of victims' families have claimed that the commission has numerous conflicts of interest. 9/11 CitizensWatch, in particular, called for the resignation of Philip D. Zelikow, the executive staff director. Zelikow is a Bush-appointee who served on the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. He spent three years on the President George H. W. Bush's National Security Council. Zelikow worked closely with Bush NSC advisor Condoleezza Rice and even co-wrote a book with her. Some worry that Zelikow may be using his power to deflect blame from himself and to protect Rice. Both the Family Steering Committee and 9-11 Citizens Watch demanded his resignation, without success. (Philip D. Zelikow).

In addition, many members had ties which could be viewed as conflicts of interest.

File:911Commissioners MEDRES.jpg
Members of the 9/11 commission. Top row: Ben-Veniste, Lehman, Roemer, Thompson, Kerrey, Gorton. Bottom row: Fielding, Hamilton (Vice-Chairman), Kean (Chairman), Gorelick.
  • Thomas Kean has served on the Board of Directors of the National Endowment for Democracy, a long-time conduit of CIA covert operations abroad. Kean also has a history of investments that link him to Saudi Arabian investors who have financially supported both George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden in the past. One example is his former business connections to Khalid bin Mahfouz, an alleged terrorist financier. He was also at one point or still is on the board of Pepsi Bottling, Amerada Hess, UnitedHealth Group, CIT Group and Aramark.
  • Fred F. Fielding has done legal work for two of Bush's leading "Pioneer" fund-raisers. Fielding also works for a law firm lobbying for Spirit Airlines and United Airlines.
  • Slade Gorton has close ties to Boeing, which built all the planes destroyed on 9/11, and his law firm represents several major airlines, including Delta Air Lines.
  • James Thompson is the head of a law firm that lobbies for American Airlines, and he has previously represented United Airlines.
  • Richard Ben-Veniste has represented Democratic National Chairman Terry McAuliffe, and continues to represent Boeing and United Airlines.
  • Max Cleland, former U.S. Senator, has received $300,000 from the airline industry. He has since resigned from the commission.
  • Lee Hamilton sits on many advisory boards, including those to the CIA, the President's Homeland Security Advisory Council, and the US Army.
  • Tim Roemer represents Boeing and Lockheed Martin.
  • Jamie Gorelick's firm has agreed to represent Prince Mohammed al Faisal in the suit by the 9/11 families. The families contend that al Faisal has legal responsibility for the 9/11 attacks. According to Attorney General John Ashcroft in his testimony before the commission, Gorelick wrote a procedural memo that would have prevented communication between various government agencies (the wall memo[2]). She also is on the board of United Technologies.

The commission's defenders claim that these do not represent significant conflicts of interest, and that the commission maintained its neutrality.

Claims of lack of cooperation from the White House

In April 2002, Bush said that the investigation into 9/11 should be confined to Congress because it deals with sensitive information that could reveal sources and methods of intelligence. [3]. But by September, the White House came under intense fire concerning the commission from many victims' families [4]. In response, President Bush finally agreed to the creation of an independent 9/11 commission. [5] But many 9/11 victims' families believed that the scope of the investigation by the Commission did not go far enough in investigating the U.S. government's failures because the Commission was not to investigate intelligence failures[6].

However, the White House insisted that it was to appoint the commission's chair, leading some to question the commission's independence. The initial person appointed to head the commission, Henry Kissinger, has been accused by many of having been involved in past government coverups in South America (specifically, the overthrow of the Allende government in Chile).

Even after Kissinger resigned, the White House was often cited as having attempted to block the release of information to the commission [7] and for refusing to give interviews without tight conditions attached (leading to threats to subpoena [8]). The Bush Administration has further been accused of attempting to derail the commission by giving it one of the smallest independent commission funding levels in recent history ($3 million [9]), and by giving the commission a very short deadline. The White House insists that they have given the commission "unprecedented cooperation".

While President Bush and Vice President Cheney did ultimately agree to testify, they did so only under several conditions:

  • They would be allowed to testify jointly;
  • They would not be required to take an oath before testifying;
  • The testimony would not be recorded electronically or transcribed, and that the only record would be notes taken by one of the commission staffers;
  • These notes would not be made public.

The commission agreed to these conditions, and the President and Vice President gave their testimony on April 29.

Commissioners suspected the Pentagon was deceiving the Commission

For more than two years after the attacks, officials with North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) provided inaccurate information about the response to the hijackings in testimony and media appearances. Authorities suggested that U.S. air defenses had reacted quickly, that jets had been scrambled in response to the last two hijackings and that fighters were prepared to shoot down United Airlines Flight 93 if it threatened Washington, D.C..

The Commission reported a year later that audiotapes from NORAD's Northeast headquarters and other evidence showed clearly that the military never had any of the hijacked airliners in its sights and at one point chased a phantom aircraft -- American Airlines Flight 11 -- long after it had crashed into the World Trade Center. (Washington Post, August 2, 2006, [10] For example, Maj. Gen. Larry Arnold and Col. Alan Scott told the commission that NORAD had begun tracking United 93 at 9:16 a.m., but the commission determined that the airliner was not even hijacked until 12 minutes later. According to later testimony, the military was not aware of the flight until after it had crashed in Pennsylvania.

The Commission was forced to use subpoenas to obtain the cooperation of the FAA and NORAD to release evidence such as audiotapes. The agencies' reluctance to release the tapes -- along with e-mails, erroneous public statements and other evidence -- led some of the panel's staff members and commissioners to believe that authorities sought to mislead the commission and the public about what happened on September 11. "I was shocked at how different the truth was from the way it was described," John Farmer, a former New Jersey attorney general who led the staff inquiry into events on September 11, said in an August 2006 interview. (Washington Post, August 2, 2006)[11].

Claims that the investigation lacked adequate funds

". . .Whereas the investigation of the Challenger disaster received $50 million, Bush promised only $3 million for the investigation of the much more deadly and complex disaster of 9/11. He then initially resisted when the commission asked for an additional $8 million."

from David Ray Griffin's The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions. p.284

Claims the commission was used for partisan purposes

Some conservatives believe that the Democratic Party used the commission for partisan advantage during the 2004 election campaign. Rather than focusing equally on all factors, critics predicted that Congressional Democrats would ignore any policy errors made by Bill Clinton while emphasizing the mistakes of President Bush[12].

In contrast, many opponents of the Bush administration believe that the commission was set up to perform a superficial examination of the background of the attacks, thereby meeting public demands for an investigation while still preventing any substantive examination. Also they argue that Republicans on the commission and in Congress ignored mistakes of the Bush admistration while exaggerating those made by former President Clinton.

Four books that critique the official Commission are Crossing the Rubicon by Michael Ruppert[13], The Terror Timeline: Year by Year, Day by Day, Minute by Minute, by Paul Thompson[14], The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions, A Critique of the Kean-Zelikow Report by David Ray Griffin[15], and Cover Up: What the Government is Still Hiding About the War on Terror, by Peter Lance[16]. All describe severe conflicts of interest that the Commissioners had and point out problems in the official narrative that suggest the attacks were allowed to happen in order to achieve long-sought policy changes (the Iraq war and "Homeland Security").

Newsweek, in late February, 2006, reported that a draft of the 9/11 Commission Report expressed skepticism about Dick Cheney's claim to have spoken with President Bush before giving an order to shoot down United Flight 93. According to Newsweek, White House officials successfully fought to have those parts of the report toned down[17].

Claims the commission ignored or censored key government evidence

Former FBI, NSA and other federal intelligence experts claim the 9/11 Commission report was fundamentally flawed because the 9/11 Commission refused to hear, ignored, or censored testimony about the many pre-September 11 warnings given to the the FBI and U.S. intelligence agencies. These federal whistleblowers claim that in an effort to avoid having to hold any individual accountable, the 9/11 Commission turned a blind eye on FBI agent-provided evidence before September 11 regarding the 9/11 plot[18].

Claims the commission ignored information regarding Able Danger

The reputation and credibility of the commission has recently been damaged by evidence of a lack of thoroughness or possibly a coverup. In August 2005, Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer claimed he had informed 9/11 Commission Executive Director Dr. Philip D. Zelikow about a highly classified data-mining project called Able Danger that had identified two of the three terrorist cells responsible for 9/11. Shaffer said Dr. Zelikow was initially very interested and gave Shaffer his card to contact him again. However, Shaffer claims when he contacted Dr. Zelikow, he was no longer interested in information about Able Danger[19]. The commission later issued a response saying they found Shaffer "not sufficiently reliable" and the information was "lacking historical significance" and did not warrant further investigation. [20] Subsequently, four additional "credible witnesses" have come forward to support Shaffer's account of Able Danger[21].

Former Senator Slade Gorton (R-WA), a member of the Commission, said: "Bluntly, it just didn't happen and that's the conclusion of all 10 of us." A search for documents on Able Danger has not been very productive, leading U.S. Representative Curt Weldon (R-PA) to speculate that a coverup may have occurred[22]. The Pentagon investigated the matter and has not been able to find any documentary evidence confirming the allegations[23]. Pentagon spokesman Army Maj. Paul Swiergosz said: "We've interviewed 80 people involved with Able Danger, combed through hundreds of thousands of documents and millions of e-mails and have still found no documentation of Mohamed Atta." But Weldon claims that the Pentagon ordered the destruction of a large volume of documents related to Able Danger[24].

Claims of gentle treatment of Rudy Giuliani

Commissioners Thomas Kean, a Republican, and Lee Hamilton, a Democrat, disclosed in their 2006 book Without Precedent: The Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission (ISBN 0-307-26377-0) that the Commission did not pursue a tough enough line of questioning with former New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani because its members feared public anger if they challenged him.

"It proved difficult, if not impossible, to raise hard questions about 9/11 in New York without it being perceived as criticism of the individual police and firefighters or of Mayor Giuliani. We did not ask tough questions, nor did we get all of the information we needed to put on the public record," they wrote. As the New York Times reported, "The commission’s gentle questioning of Mr. Giuliani during his May 19, 2004, testimony at the New School University in Greenwich Village was "a low point" in its handling of witnesses at its public hearings, they wrote."[3]

The authors assert that the commission had failed to ask Giuliani more probing questions partly because of criticism of a comment by fellow commissioner John F. Lehman. At the hearing on 18 May, the day before Giuliani's testimony, Lehman stated that New York’s disaster-response plans were "not worthy of the Boy Scouts, let alone this great city." The following morning, the cover of The New York Post displayed a photograph of a firefighter kneeling at the World Trade Center site, captioned with the single word "Insult" above.

The commission has been criticized for its delicate treatment of Giuliani by some relatives of 9/11 victims. The New York Times reported that during his testimony at the public hearing, Giuliani and others were interrupted by audience members imploring commissioners to ask the former mayor about trouble with radio communications and other problems the day of the attack. One man shouted, "My brother was a fireman, and I want to know why 300 firemen died," adding, "Let’s ask some real questions. Is that unfair?" Several people were removed from the hearing.[3]

The book does not, however, criticize Giuliani's testimony itself. The authors said he "spoke calmly and articulately, and with emotion."

Commission recommendations

  • The U.S. government must identify and prioritize actual or potential terrorist sanctuaries.
  • The United States should make the difficult long-term commitment to the future of Pakistan.
  • The United States and the international community should make a long-term commitment to a secure and stable Afghanistan.
  • The problems in the U.S.-Saudi relationship must be confronted, openly.
  • The U.S. government must define what the message is, that for which it stands.

Work of commissioners after the Commission ceased its functions

Months after the 9/11 Commission had officially issued its report and ceased its functions, Chairman Kean and other commissioners toured the country to draw attention to the recommendations of the Commission for reducing the terror risk, claiming that some of their recommendations were being ignored. Co-chairs Kean and Hamilton wrote a book about the constraints they faced as commissioners titled Without Precedent: The Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission.

References

  1. ^ Jehl, Douglas (8 August 2005, corrected 9 August). "Four in 9/11 Plot Are Called Tied to Qaeda in '00". New York Times. Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. Retrieved 2006-08-07. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  2. ^ Cable News Network (13 December 2002). "Kissinger resigns as head of 9/11 commission". CNN Inside Politics. Time Warner. Retrieved 2006-08-07. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  3. ^ a b Williams, Timothy (06 August 2006). "9/11 Commissioners Say They Went Easy on Giuliani to Avoid Public's Anger". New York Times. Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. Retrieved 2006-08-07. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help) (website requires registration)

See also

Critical Essays and Books

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