This is the first in a five-part series focused on the recent book by Philip Shenon titled The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation. It was one of the most shocking and informative books I've ever read, and details how much our country's leaders failed to protect us in the months and years before 9/11 and how much they've tried to protect themselves by keeping that knowledge away from the public's eyes and ears. So far, they've been remarkably successful. Not only did President Bush get re-elected, but Condoleezza Rice, the one person in government most responsible for allowing an al Qaeda attack on U.S. soil, received a promotion to Secretary of State, a position she currently holds. People are even floating her name as a potential VP candidate under McCain. Unbelievable. Throughout this series I will hold people accountable. Hopefully it makes a difference, at least in my readers' eyes.
Part 1: The Politics of the 9/11 Commission
President Bush spent the first two years after 9/11 ramping up the country for war against Iraq, despite no link between the sovereign nation and the 9/11 attacks, and steadfastly refusing to allow any and all inquiries into the 9/11 attacks to see the light of day. Finally, after repeated and extensive lobbying by the families of the citizens who died in the attacks, he eventually relented and Congress passed a law to create a bipartisan 9/11 Commission that had 16 months to create an all-encompassing report on the attack. Five Democratic and five Republican Commissioners were chosen, after weeks of negotiation. Henry Kissinger was the hand-picked Bush guy to lead the commission, but he backed out after meeting with the 9/11 widows, who demanded that his company's Saudi Arabian interests be made public. George Mitchell was the lead Democratic choice, but he had similar concerns about publicizing his client list and backed out as well. A couple years later he would head another very important commission that had his name splattered across the front pages of newspapers for over a month this winter and brought about multiple congressional hearings. Of course, baseball's leaders didn't make Senator Mitchell expose his client list. But thank god our media and congressional leaders spent so much time on his inquiry into steroid use. That is as serious an issue as the greatest attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor.
After Kissinger and Mitchell backed out, two somewhat surprising choices were picked to head the Commission. Former NJ governor Tom Kean, a lifelong Republican with a disdain for Washington politics, was the Bush White House's new selection. Former congressman Lee Hamilton, known for being a moderate with close ties on both sides of the aisle, was the Democrats' choice. As it turned out, Kean, who attempted to be completely impartial, was much harsher on the White House than Hamilton. In fact, Hamilton seemed to side with the other Republican commissioners on any disputed issue that split the Commission otherwise along party lines. Kean was seen as fair by both sides. In this arrangement, the Republicans ended up with an edge, although all commissioners did their best to attempt to be impartial. In the end, though, an overall attempt to gain consensus in the report, along with a time crush, forced the Commission to leave out the most controversial and damning aspects uncovered by the investigation. The truth did not come out. And Kean and Hamilton combined had less power over the Report and its conclusions than the Executive Director of the Commission, a little known terrorism expert from the University of Virginia, Philip Zelikow.
The Executive Director ran the Commission. The ten publicly appointed commissioners were all former lawmakers but none were particular experts on the subject they were studying and the day-to-day work of research, interviews, and reading pages and pages of secret documents were left mostly to the 80-person staff hired for their particular expertise. The Executive Director ran the 80-person staff, gave them all their assignments, and handled all interactions between them and the commissioners. In other words, Philip Zelikow ran the 9/11 Commission. And he was as far from a non-partisan as Karl Rove. In fact, on multiple occasions in the first summer of the investigation, staffers caught him making and receiving telephone calls to Mr. Rove. Phone records indicate the same thing. The person running the 9/11 Commission was having secret interactions with the person running the White House during the investigation. Conflict of interest much?
Zelikow had written or edited fourteen books, several dozen scholarly articles, and was considered an expert in every sort of national security issue, including terrorism. He was not a friendly man and often rubbed his colleagues the wrong way, but no one denied that he could run an effective commission. And he did. He also ramrodded the entire investigation to fit his preconceived notions of the outcome and attempted at all turns to assist the White House in stonewalling the investigation, and in helping out his close friend, Ms. Condoleezza Rice. Zelikow worked on the National Security Council for the first President Bush. He co-authored a book with Rice. And he worked on the transition team with Rice for the current President Bush, helping to shape some of the foreign policy and national security decisions that directly resulted in 9/11. None of this was revealed to the public. Hell, the public doesn't to this day know who Philip Zelikow is. And is it any wonder that Rice -- despite her huge role in the failure to prevent 9/11 -- comes off virtually untouched in the Commission's Report? (Pictured at right: Philip Zelikow)
Richard Clarke was also a counter terrorism expert, working in the first and second Bush and the Clinton administration. He was the foremost expert in the entire country on al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. He had studied them for years, recognized the significance of the threat, and recommended to Clinton that bin Laden be assassinated. Clarke's efforts had been lauded in preventing the al Qaeda attempt to bomb Los Angeles International Airport in December 1999. Bu when Bush took over the White House, Clarke and his counter terrorism team was demoted within the NSC, and he no longer had access to the leaders of national security matters. His flood of terrorist warnings in the months before 9/11 ended up being ignored. The person in the Bush transition team most responsible for Clarke's "reassignment" was Philip Zelikow. As Clarke liked to say as soon as he found out Zelikow would be in charge of the 9/11 Commission, "the fix was in."
[Clarke] had not always been pessimistic about the 9/11 commission. When Congress finally overcame Bush's objections to an independent investigation and established the panel in late 2002, Clarke told colleagues that with the right commissioners and an aggressive staff, there was some hope that they would find out the truth of how Bush and Rice -- Rice in particular -- had repeatedly ignored the intelligence in 2001.
But the appointment of Zelikow suggested to Clarke that the commission had been turned into just another instrument for the Bush administration to try to hide the truth... Surely Zelikow would have no interest in a detailed public explanation of what had happened during the 2001 transition, since he had been such a central part of it. Zelikow helped lay the groundwork for much of what went wrong at the White House in the weeks and months before September 11. Would he want people to know this?
As it turned out, the answer was No. Zelikow ran a very tight and authoritarian ship, got rid of any staff members that disagreed with him, and by the end, had virtually complete control over every page that was written for the final commission report. Even if he truly attempted to be nonpartisan AND could put aside his longstanding friendship with Rice AND his own implication during the Bush transition, his own personal counter terrorism beliefs and ideals had to play a part in the report. He didn't recognize the al Qaeda threat, not like Clarke, not like the CIA. Even after the attack, he was one of the neocons convinced that Iraq played a role and that state-sponsored terrorism was still what we were fighting. He even authored the parts of President Bush's speech in 2002 that directly linked Iraq and al Qaeda. All of these things have been proven by history to be wrong. Zelikow was wrong. He wrote the 9/11 report. And one of his closest friends was Condi Rice. Unbelievable.
Zelikow instead focused the report, and the investigation, on the CIA, believing they were responsible for failures in intelligence. In his very first meeting with assistant director Mark Lowenthal, Zelikow claimed "If you guys had a national intelligence director, none of this would have ever happened... 9/11 was a massive failure of the CIA and the attacks happened because you guys weren't connected to the rest of the community." In reality, the CIA was the organization probably least culpable in the attacks. They found the most evidence about al Qaeda's activities, were the only organization in all of government that seemed concerned about an attack, and even of course wrote the infamous August 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Briefing "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside United States." These concerns were virtually ignored by the White House. Yet Zelikow thought they were to blame, not the White House that ignored them. In the final commission documents, he gives equal weight to Rice's statements in support of her "efforts" as he does to the clear evidence of her ignorance.
In the final report, the commission's central recommendation was the creation of the job of director of national intelligence (Zelikow's main belief before he even started the investigation). Bush embraced the recommendation and appointed John Negroponte to the job. The CIA - and all intelligence gathering agencies - reported to him. He lasted 21 months in the job before resigning and taking a position as deputy secretary of state under Condoleezza Rice. One of Negroponte's co-workers in the same office -- the newly selected State Department counselor, one of Rice's closest advisers: Professor Philip Zelikow from the University of Virginia. (pictured at right: Zelikow, in the blue tie, standing next to Rice)
"Philip and I have worked together for years," Rice said on February 25, 2006. "I value his counsel and expertise. I appreciate his willingness to take on this assignment."
Zelikow told his new colleagues at the State Department that it was the sort of job he had always wanted.
Stay tuned for the next part in this 5-part series, exposing the Bush White House's stonewalling and how Alberto Gonzales was an integral part of the systematic attempt to keep facts away from the public (and he was mostly successful).
I've been trying to come up with an appropriate response to this post. I can't do it.
Posted by: Dan | April 12, 2008 at 07:55 PM