Proof the 911 Commission was a joke?, page 1

A new book is about to come out on the joke that was the 911 Commission, and the alleged charges that many of us have been making for some time: that the 911 Commission was a phony investigation.

rawstory.com...

9/11 Commission member John Lehman goes on to tell MSNBC that it was impossible not to go through Karl Rove when documents such as presidential daily briefings were needed. Many Commission members, he says, pressed the White House to provide more information and lift restrictions on a regular basis.

"We had to go through Karl Rove, and through [Attorney General Alberto] Gonzales and the other most senior members," says Lehman. He indeed hoped that Zelikow was talking to Karl Rove, although he expressed disappointment that contact with the White House wasn't more frequent towards the beginning of the investigations.

And then from this other link:

rawstory.com...

Widows of World Trade Center victims demanded Zelikow resign around the same time, when news emerged that Zelikow had participated in Bush administration transition briefings, but the commission's chairmen defended their executive director.

"Because he was one of the best experts on terrorism in the whole area of intelligence in the entire country, the same--they asked him to help the same reason we asked him to help," 9/11 Commission chairman Thomas Kean said on Meet the Press then. "We haven't found, I think, either Vice Chairman [Lee] Hamilton or myself, any evidence to indicate in any way that he's partial to anybody or anything."

Critics scoffed at that justification.

So this book is due to be published on Feb 5th. We need to monitor this and report back!

It's not like any self-respecting truther needs to really hear it from anyone else, because the lack of a real investigation is evidence enough in face of the evidence. But it sure is nice.

[edit on 4-2-2008 by TrueAmerican]

reply to post by Swampfox46_1999

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lol, I think you might be missing the point here. The digging is getting deeper on the conflict of interest ties and methodologies used to influence or in this case, flat out control, what the information would be in that 911 Commission report. If they were truly interested in an impartial investigation with proper subpoena power, not only would it have happened a year sooner, they would have made very careful choices about who should participate in that kind of investigation. And yep, they made careful choices alright.

reply to post by TrueAmerican

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Good luck finding an official in Washington D.C. that would not have potential conflict of interest charges for anything. It just does NOT happen. Now, if you want to get Bubba James and Billy Joe Jim-Bob..then you might avoid that.

Doesnt matter, the 9/11 Commission was a waste of my money and the Governments time.

reply to post by Swampfox46_1999

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My apologies in advance to anyone named Bubba or Billy Joe.....before you fill up my inbox with hurt feeling messages.


Quite frankly, the Commission was an un-needed waste of time and effort....

reply to post by Swampfox46_1999

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Well I hear ya, but really there was a myriad of choices they had to do a real investigation. For instance, they might have put the oversight of the investigation into the hands of the GAO, and let them assemble the team. Or how about JudicialWatch.org? The bottom line is that is not what this administration is about, so yeah, I agree.

reply to post by TrueAmerican

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Judicial Watch? Allow a political entity to investigate a terrorist act? And they are qualified...HOW? ditto with the GAO, they might be good at going through the books, but not at investigating a crime.

reply to post by Griff

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Griff, Im glad you responded. At least you understand and like to use sarcasm. Why was it a waste of money? (in my humble opinion) Because on the eve of Sept. 11, 2001, as a bunch of us in my reserve unit were discussing what was going on, we pretty much KNEW what an investigation was going to say.

A group of determined individuals, took the time, effort and money to study our systems and then find ways to use it against us. And that, when you went through all the piles of paper on all the desks in Washington, you would find a fairly accurate representation of the terrorists and their plans. Of course, since the majority of the government investigative agencies have been hamstrung over the years with laws that did not allow them to share information, no one or two or three dozen people had the full picture....just teensy little bits.....

As for the whys of building collapses....engineers have never been real big on my list of people with common sense. I've seen way too many mistakes made by "highly qualified, highly trained" engineers to ever believe them when they say something is impossible in relation to their creations.

reply to post by Griff

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Umm, they didnt have classified information, they picked a date. And the statement about engineers wasnt a dig at you, it was a statement based on over 20 years of dealing with engineers that are brilliant....till it comes to practical application of their knowledge. Personally, I dont know if you fall into that category or not, however, blind faith that when someone says a building is impregnable or able to withstand airplanes crashing into it that they are right......not a good idea. Or even that science is an absolute...we learn new things everyday...even about physics.

reply to post by Swampfox46_1999

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Swamp,
I meant to ask you if you would like to join my death squad. We have an enormous backlog and will be needing much help in the near future!!

You seem to have an outstanding grasp on current events and are the type of fellow I know we could count on!

reply to post by Swampfox46_1999

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I would have wanted information on the insider trading, financing and the like, as well as information on the blatant lies told regarding the conceivability of airplane hijacking terrorist attacks.

Not to mention checks to see if there was any incompetence when dealing with the events.

A real investigation would have been worth the money, in my opinion.

I also find it interesting the date and time chosen happened to coincide with multiple wargames, some dealing with similar scenarios.

Originally posted by Swampfox46_1999
reply to post by TrueAmerican

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Judicial Watch? Allow a political entity to investigate a terrorist act? And they are qualified...HOW? ditto with the GAO, they might be good at going through the books, but not at investigating a crime.

I never said for them to investigate it themselves, I said for them to assemble a team, to insure the impartiality of the investigation. And you are probably right in that respect that what I am suggesting never happens in Washington. But regardless of that tangent, the fact that an investigation was initially denied for over a year should stop all horses in their tracks right there. Cause the rabbit done died.

It just does not make reasonable, logical sense to any sane person why an investigation would be DENIED on such a massive crime. And after enough pressure when they were faced with an investigation, they initially allocate like $700,000 for the whole thing after spending $440 million investigating a blowjob?

I mean really. There are things very wrong here at the core, before we even start discussion on the Report itself. Like I said, the horses stopped back at the track. With that circumstantial evidence existing before even dealing with the report, in any fair court the case would be tossed. It is a hoax, plain and simple.

You may not like this new book coming out, swamp. But I for one am very interested in learning more just about how that investigation was overseen, the conflicts of interest, and the potential motives as viewed from the author. It may help connect more pieces of this convoluted puzzle.

More pertinent to this story, from The White House Mole

Michael Isikoff writes in Newsweek: "In the summer of 2003, Warren Bass, an investigator for the 9/11 Commission, was digging through highly classified National Security Council documents when he came across a trove of material that startled him. Buried in the files of former White House counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke, the documents seemed to confirm charges that the Bush White House had ignored repeated warnings about the threat posed by Osama bin Laden. Clarke, it turned out, had bombarded national-security adviser Condoleezza Rice in the summer of 2001 with impassioned e-mails and memos warning of an Al Qaeda attack--and urging a more forceful U.S. government response. One e-mail jumped out: it pleaded with officials to imagine how they would feel after a tragedy where 'hundreds of Americans lay dead in several countries, including the U.S.,' adding that 'that future day could happen at any time.' The memo was written on Tuesday, Sept. 4, 2001 -- just one week before the attacks on New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

"But when Bass tried to impress the significance of what he had discovered upon the panel, he ran into what he thought was a roadblock -- his boss. Philip Zelikow, a respected University of Virginia historian hired to be the 9/11 Commission's executive director, had long been friendly with Rice. The two had coauthored a book. Rice had later placed him on a Bush transition team that reorganized the NSC (and ended up diminishing Clarke's role). At Rice's request, Zelikow had also anonymously drafted a new Bush national-security paper in September 2002 that laid out the case for preventive war.

"In commission staff meetings, Zelikow disparaged Clarke as an egomaniac and braggart who was unjustly slandering his friend Rice, according to [Shenon's] new book. . . .

"Rove himself, according to Shenon, always feared that a report which laid the blame for 9/11 at the president's doorstep was the one development that could most jeopardize Bush's 2004 re-election. That's one reason why White House lawyers tried to stonewall the commission from the outset. When Clarke finally did testify about his warnings to Rice, Shenon reports, White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and his aides feverishly drafted tough questions and phoned them in to GOP commissioners to undermine Clarke's credibility. Later, when Attorney General John Ashcroft unveiled a memo that seemed to cast the antiterror record of the Clinton Justice Department in an unflattering light, Gonzales and his aides high-fived each other."

Some more friendly insider information just as a bit of back up, before we see the book mentioned in OP.

So one week out Clarke was pouring his heart out at the administration to do something, eh?

Man oh man. See on one side if you argue the official story, you're screwed. But now you argue the other side and you're an enemy combatant. Any wonder so many of us are on the proverbial fence?

Accompanying msnbc video on the topic subject can be found
here:

www.msnbc.msn.com...

reply to post by bsbray11

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Good points bsbray.

I think one of the things that the 911 Commission suffered from is what we see today all over government. The good people getting mixed in with the bad. I do not believe every single person on the commission was in on it. Just the key players. And of course, that's all you need when it comes down to it. Bush wouldn't even allow recordings of his testimony. Think about that.

I am a believer in the adage that "Good deeds are done in the sunlight, and bad deeds are done under the cover of darkness."

Update:

9/11 widows call for new investigation after revelations of White House, commission ties

rawstory.com...

"General Michael Hayden, who headed the NSA at the time, was eager to cooperate and share what his organization had with the 9/11 Commission, but Executive Director Zelikow was not interested," 9/11 widows Patty Casazza, Monica Gabriellle, Mindy Kleinberg and Lorie Van Auken said in a statement reacting to the book.

"Why didnt Phil Zelikow make reviewing these vital NSA documents a Commission priority?" they ask. "It seems clear that not every fact and lead was followed in this investigation compromising the validity of the Commission's final report and its findings."

The 9/11 widows called for Zelikow to resign or be fired from the Commission back in 2004, when his ties with Rice and Rove were first revealed. Shenon's book, they say, proves their concerns were right all along.

"It is abundantly clear that Philip Zelikow should have immediately been replaced when the first rumblings of his impropriety and conflicts of interest surfaced," they said. "When all of this information became clear, the Commissioners and the press should have called for Zelikows resignation. We did. Shamefully, most were silent."

Perhaps the truther movement has not paid enough attention to a critically important element: that of the widows, families, and victims. They have a pretty serious emotional need to know the truth- and an "earned" right for the same.

I can only imagine how new information forthcoming on the subject will affect THEM. My heart and sympathy goes out to all those paying the heavy price of the death of a loved one with what seems to be brick walls for any kind of vindication. While some took the money and ran, many others did not and are still heavily pressing for truth and a new investigation. Can anyone really blame them in the face of the evidence?

In another Bush administration exposé, investigative reporter Ron Suskind revealed the president's brush-off of the ominous memo warning "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.":

"All right," Bush told the panicked CIA briefer who interrupted the president's vacation to deliver the warning in person. "You've covered your ass, now."

The 9/11 widows also fault the Commission for relying too much on information gained from "second and third hand knowledge of interrogations of tortured individuals, detainees that were being held in secret locations."

They say Shenon's book reveals information that "only scratches the surface" of what happened within the government before the 9/11 attacks.

"The bottom line is that the most deadly attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor remains dangerously unexamined," they write. "This can only be remedied with an investigation guided by the facts and conducted outside the reach of those with a vested interest in suppressing the truth."

I have a burning need to know as an American. But they have a burning and emotional need to know the truth. And there is no contest. It might pay for all of us interested in a new, real investigation grab a hold of some coattails here.

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