THE OFFICIAL 9/11 INQUIRY: ANOTHER WARREN COMMISSION?

By 2011, the only people who did not know at least some of the truth about 9/11 were those who chose not to look at the evidence and, instead, chose to place full faith and confidence in the government's investigation.

And that investigation was meagerly funded and filled, not with academics, scientists or engineers, but instead veterans of the FBI, CIA and other national security agencies under the direction of Philip Zelikow, a longstanding operative for the Bush administration.

According to Eric Margolis, a longtime print journalist who has appeared frequently on CNN, the 9/11 investigation was a “whitewash, as are all such government commissions. They are designed to obscure, not reveal, the truth.”

As previously mentioned, the commission's chief attorney, John Farmer, has stated that their official version of the events of 9/11 are “almost entirely, and inexplicably, untrue.”

Even 9/11 Commission Co-Chairman Lee Hamiliton has admitted many flaws in the commission's work. “I don't believe for a minute we got everything right. We wrote a first draft of history,” said Hamilton in an interview. “People will be investigating 9/11 for the next 100 years in this country and they're going to find some things that we missed.”

Hamilton also admitted that he believed the official 9/11 Commission investigation was “set up to fail.” “[W]e got started late. We had a very short time frame. Indeed, we had to get it extended. We did not have enough money. They [the Bush White House] were afraid we were going to hang somebody, that we would point the finger [of guilt]. A lot of people had things to hide.”

The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, popularly known as the 9/11 Commission, released its final report to the public in mid-summer 2004, nearly three full years after the horrifying attacks of September 11, 2001. The voluminous 567-page report answered virtually none of the vital questions that have been raised by independent researchers and the 9/11 families.

It also quickly became clear that when it came to the two prominent views of history—conspiracy or accidental—the commissioners were solid supporters of both schools. According to them, the attacks of 9/11 resulted from a malignant conspiracy of freedom-hating Muslim fanatics who successfully carried out a complex terrorist plot for less than $1 million. However, they were aided and abetted by a systematic series of miscues, mistakes and malfeasance on the part of a variety of US government officials and agencies that lacked “imagination” due to hardened Cold War mindsets. Yet, to date, not one single government employee has been fired, re-assigned or even disciplined due to the failures of that day. In fact, many of those who should have been called on the carpet for incompetence instead were promoted and their budgets increased.

Immediately, many commentators likened the report to that of the infamous Warren Commission Report issued less than one year after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. And the similarities are indeed striking. Like the Warren Commission before it, the 9/11 Commission's sins were more of of omission rather than commission. For example, there was no mention of the collapse of WTC Building 7 or of FBI Special Agent Coleen Rowley, the Minneapolis division counsel, who accused higher FBI officials of blocking investigations into al Qaeda prior to 9/11 or of the numerous examples of foreknowledge of the attacks.

And like the Warren Commission's 26 volumes, The 9/11 Commission Report has no index, making it difficult for any serious researcher to move through it and connect both personages and events. And like that earlier report, this latest government account has met unqualified acceptance by the corporate-controlled mass media as well as those members of the public who blindly accept the views presented on television and the major print publications. As occurred with the Warren Report, will it also take 40 years for the general public to learn of the many revelations that undo the official 9/11 account?

Both the Warren volumes and The 9/11 Commission Report inundates the readers with pages of superfluous and tedious historical and operational data on government agencies and policies. Yet, it fails to adequately address some of the more serious issues raised in this book and elsewhere.

Numerous factual distortions have already been pointed out, but there are just as many large omissions, the most egregious being no mention of WTC Building 7. In other examples, the report fails to mention Operation Northwoods, the early 1960s plan approved by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to encourage public support for another attack upon Castro's Cuba by false-flag attacks on America designed to incriminate Castro. Nor is there any mention of the Project for a New American Century, the neo-conservative think tank filled with current Bush Administration officials that long before the events of 9/11 laid out a plan to invade Afghanistan and Iraq based on a “new Pearl Harbor.”

Retired Lt. Col. Karen U. Kwiatkowski, a graduate of both the Air Command and Staff College (ACSC) and the US Naval War College who was in the Pentagon when it was struck on 9/11, remarked how swiftly the military moved to prepare for the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. “The invasion plan for Afghanistan was moving rapidly,” she noted. “At the time I wondered how we could do the planning and the work as quickly as we did. But I found out later that their plans to topple the Taliban had been in place months before 9/11 and that Iraq was discussed openly as a target within days of 9/11.”

The Warren Report rested on the shaky premise of Arlen Specter's single bullet theory—the idea that one rifle slug passed through both President Kennedy and Texas Governor John Connally—causing seven separate wounds to both men including hitting at least two bones—yet emerged to be found unscathed in a hospital hallway. Similarly, the 9/11 Commission's verdict that 9/11 was simply the result of miscues, miscommunication and a system badly in need of centralization is based on the equally implausible premise that at least 19 fanatical Arab Muslims—some with expired visas or questionable passports and some on security watch lists—traveled to various countries where plans were hatched, came in and out of the USA and trained at US flight schools directly under the nose of US authorities without arousing any notice or suspicion, but were then easily identified to a man within hours of the attacks.

Likewise, the 9/11 Commission failed to report the historic fact that Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network grew directly out of the force of Islamic fundamentalists recruited to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan under the auspices of the CIA. It even omits mention of the fact that Osama himself, under the name “Tim Osman,” had received aid and training from US military and intelligence assets.

Even if there was no intent to cover up the truth, the commission was not funded at a level sufficient to do its work. Incredibly, more than three times as much money was spent on George W. Bush's 2005 inauguration than was originally allocated to investigate the attacks on September 11, 2001. While a total of $112.6 million was spent to investigate the 2003 space shuttle Columbia disaster and $50 million was once spent to look into Las Vegas gambling casinos, the 9/11 tragedy received a mere $13 million to probe the greatest attack on America since 1812. The Presidential Inaugural Committee estimated Bush's 2005 inauguration events cost about $40 million, with the federal government and District of Columbia bearing an additional $20 million as the cost of providing security.

From the outset, President Bush made clear that he wanted no independent investigation into the attacks. Bowing to the entreaties of 9/11 families, the Bush administration initially promised only $3 million to investigate 9/11; it later relented after additional public pressure, plus complaints from the commission itself that this amount was inadequate, and released another $10 million. It should be noted that even the inadequate first official inquiry into 9/11—the Joint Intelligence Congressional inquiry in 2002 which probed activities of the intelligence community in connection with the attacks—also was resisted by the Bush administration.

In 2002, many of the 9/11 families embittered by the omissions and limitations of the congressional inquiry into 9/11, these bereaved Americans found themselves back in Washington lobbying for a truly independent commission, while submitting a lengthy list of unanswered questions.

President Bush staunchly resisted further efforts to investigate the 9/11 attacks until November 2002, when, under intense pressure from victims’ families and the public alike, he signed into law a bill creating the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States—usually referred to as simply the 9/11 Commission. The new commission, whose charter was to conduct an independent and nonpartisan investigation, was intended to pick up where the congressional inquiry left off. It held its first hearings in late March 2003.

Curiously, as if historical amnesia had settled over it, the commission's final report never mentioned the delays and the obstructions perpetrated by the Bush administration, including numerous instances of administration stonewalling during the entire life of the commission. Nor was the American public told of the iron-handed leadership of the commission as applied by Executive Director Philip Zelikow.

Hardly “independent” or “nonpartisan,” Zelikow was, for starters, a Republican and a member of President Bush's own Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. He had previously served as a national security adviser in the Ford and Bush I administrations, and was director of the Aspen Strategy Group, a policy program of the Aspen Institute, considered by many as a key globalist think tank. Zelikow, along with National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, both prominent members of the Council on Foreign Relations, co-authored a book entitled Germany Unified and Europe Transformed. In yet another example of blatant conflict of interest, Zelikow was also a member of the Bush-Cheney transition team, which helped form the current National Security Council, which oversees national security policy.

Zelikow was widely considered by many as Bush's “gatekeeper” on the 9/11 Commission. Zelikow tightly controlled the scope and reach of the investigation. As executive director, he guided the staff, which did virtually all the work of the commission, and decided which topics were to be investigated and which witnesses would be interviewed. In concluding his comprehensive study of the commission's report, Professor David Ray Griffin declared that, given the direct ties of Zelikow to the White House and his ability to shape the investigation, his presence as the executive director was the equivalent of its work being “conducted by Condoleezza Rice, Dick Cheney, or George Bush.”

A White House insider with longstanding connections to foreign policy decisions, Zelikow was the principal author of the administration's 2002 Statement on National Security Strategy, in which the controversial new neo-conservative doctrine of pre-emptive warfare was first articulated and adopted as a foundation of US foreign policy.

This document was to provide crucial doctrinal support for the pre-emptive wars in Afghanistan and Iraq soon to follow. “We can understand, therefore,” says Griffin, “why the commission, under Zelikow's leadership, would have ignored all evidence that would point to the truth: that 9/11 was a false-flag operation intended to authorize the doctrines and funds needed for a new level of imperial mobilization.”

Zelikow is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, that secretive body at the heart of American foreign policy. Contrary to his pledge of no contact with the Bush administration, Zelikow held surreptitious telephone conversations with Bush's Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove during the time of his 9/11 Commission leadership.

And he was no stranger to the idea of terrorism against America. In 1998, he co-authored an article along with former CIA Director John Deutch and former Assistant Secretary of Defense Ashton B. Carter that was published in the Council on Foreign Relations publication Foreign Affairs under the title “Catastrophic Terrorism: Tackling the New Danger.” Under a section oddly entitled “Imagining the Transforming Event,” they foresaw, “[a] successful attack with weapons of mass destruction [that] could certainly take thousands, or tens of thousands, of lives. If the device that exploded in 1993 under the World Trade Center had been nuclear, or had effectively dispersed a deadly pathogen, the resulting horror and chaos would have exceeded our ability to describe it.

“Such an act of catastrophic terrorism would be a watershed event in American history. It could involve loss of life and property unprecedented in peacetime and undermine America's fundamental sense of security, as did the Soviet atomic bomb test in 1949. Like Pearl Harbor, this event would divide our past and future into a before and after. The United States might respond with draconian measures, scaling back civil liberties, allowing wider surveillance of citizens, detention of suspects, and use of deadly force. More violence could follow, either further terrorist attacks or US counter-attacks.”

Such prophetic foresight prompted journalist Christopher Bollyn to comment, “This article is clearly an architectural-level document. It is meant to explain what should be done in the event of the catastrophic terror attack its authors are ‘imagining.’ For this reason, the authors deserve to be investigated to see what kind of relationship they might have to those who carried out the false-flag terror attacks of 9/11.”

In an incident filled with incredible irony, Bush's first choice to head the 9/11 Commission was Henry Kissinger, a prominent Council on Foreign Relations member and perhaps the man most responsible for producing the past thirty years of United States foreign policy. It is this deeply flawed foreign policy, mostly thinly disguised neocolonialism and nation looting, that has resulted in worldwide antipathy for America's role in the world in recent years. Many observers believe that events like 9/11 represent revenge, or “blowback,” for such neo-imperial policies.

Though pictured in the corporate mass media as a prominent statesman, there is a darker side to Kissinger, as evidenced by several warrants outstanding in two European countries for war crimes and complicity in murder. In May 2001, for example, during a stay at the Ritz Hotel in Paris, he was visited by the criminal brigade of the French police, and served with a summons. Kissinger made a hasty exit, never to return to France.

Christopher Hitchens, a regular contributor to Vanity Fair and author of several noted books, including The Trial of Henry Kissinger, presents a wealth of documentation showing that Kissinger was the responsible party behind a number of acts that can be considered war crimes, including atrocities during the war in Indochina—notably in Vietnam and Cambodia—and planned assassinations in Santiago, Chile; Nicosia, Cyprus; and Washington, D.C., and even genocide in East Timor. For example, in 1970, Kissinger ordered the removal of Chilean army commander in chief Rene Schneider. Schneider was a supporter of Chile's constitution who opposed what later became a right-wing coup against Socialist President Salvadore Allende, and was murdered in 1970 by right-wing plotters within the Chilean military. Former US ambassador to Chile Edward Korry confirmed Kissinger's direct role in these events. Strong evidence ties Kissinger to the actual CIA-sponsored coup itself on September 11, 1973, which resulted in the deaths of Allende and thousands of his left-wing supporters, and the imposition of a military dictatorship in that country for almost two decades.

Following a public outcry over Bush's choice to head the 9/11 Commission, Kissinger quickly withdrew, claiming he did not want to make known the client list of Kissinger Associates, which reportedly included the name bin Laden. It was known in Washington that Kissinger's firm was receiving consulting fees from corporations with large investments in Saudi Arabia, and from the oil giant Unocal, whose desire to build a pipeline through Afghanistan is discussed later in this book. Kissinger also has long been a prominent member of secretive societies such as the Council on Foreign Relations and the Bilderbergers.

Bush continued to look to the secret societies for appointments, finally settling on former New Jersey Governor Thomas H. Kean and former Indiana Representative Lee Hamilton to co-chair the commission. Both Kean and Hamilton are members of the secretive Council on Foreign Relations as were Allen Dulles and John J. McCloy of Warren Commission fame. Conflicts of interests abound with both Kean and Hamilton.

Kean's connections to the oil industry go deep. He was an official of Amerada Hess, one of the giant oil companies involved in planning the oil pipeline through Afghanistan. One Hess oil project involves a partnership with Saudi oil executive Khalid bin Mahfouz, whose name has been linked to President George W. Bush in both Texas oil deals and the BCCI banking scandal. Kean also has had exceptional input into our nation's security reformation through his co-chairmanship of this Homeland Security project.

From the Bush administration's point of view, Hamilton was ideal for the job of vice chair. Former Congressman Hamilton chaired a House committee looking into the October Surprise, a reported plan in which Reagan-Bush campaign officials made a deal with Iranian authorities not to release US hostages held in Tehran so as to insure the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. But Hamilton could find no wrongdoing despite testimony from the pilot who claimed to have flown both CIA Director William Casey and Vice President-Elect George H. W. Bush to Paris for talks with the Iranians and the fact that the hostages were released within hours of Ronald Reagan being sworn in as president on January 20, 1981. As co-chair of the House Select Committee investigating the Iran-Contra Affair, Hamilton again could find no wrongdoing in the Reagan administration's decision to secretly and illegally sell arms to Iran, as part of a national scandal that included the administration's usurpation of Congress by secretly using profits from such illegal arms sales to covertly fund a civil war in Nicaragua—plus the systematic cover-up by the Reagan administration that followed these events. Hamilton told PBS’s Frontline in the late 1980s he felt it would not have been “good for the country” to put the public through the impeachment process. Hamilton likewise turned his head from the massive documentation concerning drug smuggling by the CIA to fund the Iran-Contra operations. In the late 1990s, a CIA inspector general's report confirmed direct CIA involvement in the importation of cocaine.

It should be recalled that many of the names involved in the Iran-Contra Affair, described by journalist Bill Moyers as an attempted coup d'etat, are currently members of the Bush administration, including John Poindexter who was convicted of lying to Congress and by extension the American public.

Hamilton is a member of the Homeland Security Advisory Council and also on the board of the National Endowment for Democracy, a congressionally supported non-profit organization notorious for funneling money in support of candidates for office in foreign countries who support the rights of US corporations to invest in those countries.

Despite his government background and co-chairmanship, in later years Hamilton joined with chorus of criticism for the 9/11 Commission. “It was a huge amount of data to sort through,” said Hamilton in an interview. “We put a tremendous weight on the facts. But doing something this complex in the amount of time we were given was difficult. Oh, there were loose ends.…But I don't believe we have written the final draft. There's bound to be some information that comes out which we didn't have then.”

“We were misled by the FA A and NORAD,” he said. “When we went to NORAD command center in New York, we found tapes that had not been furnished to the commission. By listening to those tapes, we discovered that their official story didn't add up. So we issued subpoenas and started from scratch.” Admitting that there were unexplained gaps in the accounts of both the president and the vice president, Hamilton said, “When you have that, you obviously leave an opening for the conspiracy questions. But sometimes you cannot answer every question that is raised. We made a lot of judgments. I don't know if we made all the judgments correctly.”

Without explanation why the destruction of WTC Building 7 was not addressed by his commission, Hamilton merely said, “We consulted with expert architects. You simply cannot answer every question about why Building 7 collapsed.”

Other commission members also were former senior government officials and Washington insiders, such as Fred Fielding, former White House counsel to Nixon; Jamie Gorelick, deputy attorney general under Clinton; and John Lehman, Reagan's secretary of the navy.

Gorelick, yet another CFR member on the 9/11 Commission as well as a sitting board member of the oil drilling giant Schlumberger, also co-chaired the Intelligence Community Law Enforcement Policy Board along with CIA Director George Tenet at the time that Philippine authorities were reporting “Project Bojinka,” a terrorist plot to hijack commercial airliners and fly them into prominent structures. The Pentagon and the World Trade Center towers were specifically named. Gorelick was one of only two 9/11 commissioners allowed access to Bush administration classified materials.

Without belaboring the point, it becomes clear that the 9/11 Commission was loaded with persons who most probably should have been called as witnesses rather than sitting in judgment. Other commission members were striking in their lack of knowledge or experience in criminal investigations, aerodynamics or engineering, including:

John Lehman, an investment banker, was a secretary of the Navy under President Reagan; former Nebraska Senator and Governor Bob Kerrey, was trained as a pharmacist and had founded a chain of restaurants and health clubs; former Senator Slade Gorton was a lawyer a with military service background; former Rep. Timothy J. Roemer, an original sponsor of the legislation to create the Department of Homeland Security, moved from his service to the 9/11 Commission to become president of the Center for National Policy, a national security think tank, before being named US Ambassador to India by President Obama in 2009; former Illinois Governor James R. “Big Jim” Thompson held a law degree and was a former federal prosecutor whose law firm once legally represented American and United Airlines.

One commission member with an extensive background in probing government conspiracies was attorney Richard Ben-Veniste, who had been a leading prosecutor in the Watergate scandal and a chief counsel to the Senate Whitewater Committee investigating President Clinton's real estate business dealings.

As with the Warren Commission, the 9/11 Commission's final report is notable not so much for what it says but for what it does not say. Presenting time lines that contradict sworn testimony, the report nevertheless offers to the unwary a compelling and detailed narrative of the hijacking horrors of that morning.

Yet even the accommodating commission soon found itself stymied by the Bush administration, which continued to drag its feet in supplying White House key internal documents and intelligence briefings to the commission, in addition to various forms of procedural delay.

The stonewalling reached its highest point when President Bush himself was asked to testify. After a long period of declining its invitations, in February 2004 the president finally agreed to meet with the commission. This meeting took place on April 29, but not until White House counsel had negotiated restrictive terms: Vice President Cheney had to be present also, the two men were not to testify under oath, and the meeting had to take place in the Oval Office. In addition, no recording was to be made of the session, nor was a stenographer permitted to be in the room. Bush and Cheney also declined to permit notes of the three-hour session to be shared with the 9/11 families.

Through the spring of 2004, commissioners continued to complain that their work was delayed repeatedly because of disputes with the administration over access to documents and other witnesses.

“It's obvious that the White House wants to run out the clock here…” commented former Senator Max Cleland during his stint on the commission. “As each day goes by, we learn that this government knew a whole lot more about these terrorists before September 11 than it has ever admitted.” In November 2003, following a Bush White House dictate setting conditions for the examination of documents by the commission, Cleland said, “If this decision stands, I, as a member of the commission, cannot look any American in the eye, especially family members of victims, and say the commission had full access. This investigation is now compromised.”

Cleland, a Democrat who was widely regarded to be the commission's most vociferous and outspoken critic of the Bush administration. Such activity by Cleland came to a halt in December 2003 when he resigned to accept a position on the board of directors of the Export-Import Bank of the United States after being nominated by President Bush on November 21, 2003. Many observers saw Cleland's new job as nothing less than a blatant buy-off by the Bush administration. In early 2004, Cleland groused, “One of these days we will have to get the full story because the 9/11 issue is so important to America. But this White House wants to cover it up.”

John Farmer, the commission's chief counsel, added this comment, “I was shocked at how different the truth was from the way it was described. The tapes told a radically different story from what had been told to us and the public for two years.…This is not spin. This is not true.”

In a New York Times article published in January 2008 and co-authored by 9/11 Commission Co-Chairmen Hamilton and Kean, they flatly stated their investigation was stonewalled by the CIA, an arm of the executive branch. “The commission's mandate was sweeping and it explicitly included the intelligence agencies. But the recent revelations that the CIA destroyed videotaped interrogations of al Qaeda operatives leads us to conclude that the agency failed to respond to our lawful requests for information about the 9/11 plot. Those who knew about those videotapes—and did not tell us about them—obstructed our investigation,” wrote Kean and Hamilton.

It is quite apparent today that the 9/11 Commission which declined to ask any hardball questions of President Bush or his staff, was as compromised and controlled as the Warren Commission of 1964. The hardball questions, according to some, were instead reserved for 9/11 witnesses. New York firefighter Louie Cacchioli appeared before commission staffers in 2004 but quickly left. “I felt like I was being put on trial in a court room,” said Cacchioli, “They were trying to twist my words and make the story fit only what they wanted to hear. All I wanted to do was tell the truth and when they wouldn't let me do that, I walked out.”

“I met with the 9/11 Commission behind closed doors and they essentially discounted everything I said regarding the use of explosives to bring down the North Tower,” said William Rodriguez, who previously had been invited to the White House for his heroism on 9/11. In fact, neither the names of Cacchioli, Rodriguez nor the names of any other witness who reported multiple explosions at the World Trade Center can be found in the 567-page 9/11 Commission Report.

Another wrinkle in the progress of the 9/11 Commission came about due to the actual interpretation of its charter by the commissioners. This interpretation was voiced by Co-Chairman Hamilton who explained, “The focus of the commission will be on the future. We're not interested in trying to assess blame; we do not consider that part of the commission's responsibility.”

So, it was now openly acknowledged that the commission would not hold key officials accountable for their actions; instead, it would focus on ways to prevent a recurrence in the future. And indeed, the commission has lived up to this charter. This was especially revealed in its forgiving and friendly treatment of government officials offering conflicting testimony under oath. For starters, the commission's account of its interview with President Bush, with Dick Cheney present—though not under oath—was marked by the extremity of its deferential treatment of the president. In fact, according to one exhaustive review that appeared in Harper's Magazine, the commissioners permitted the president to lie repeatedly about crucial questions of fact, without challenge—according to the commission's own account of these facts.

This time on national television and for all to see, Attorney General John Ashcroft's appearance before the commission provided one of the best examples of the kid-glove treatment afforded to high administration officials who should have been directly in the line of fire for the greatest crime ever committed on American soil. According to the mainstream Democratic think tank, the Center for American Progress, Ashcroft's testimony was a “deceptive, disingenuous, and dishonest account of his record prior to 9/11 and a Pollyanna-type view of his actions following the attack. Worse, the commissioners largely accepted Ashcroft's testimony at face value and passed on opportunities to aggressively question the attorney general on inconsistencies and inaccuracies in his statements.

The acting FBI director for the three months before 9/11, Thomas Pickard, had just testified to the commission that Ashcroft had waved off an update on the terrorist threat, telling Pickard that he didn't want to hear about the subject anymore. It fell to former Illinois Governor Jim Thompson—usually the fiercest Republican defender on the commission—to ask the only critical question about this statement. When asked by Thompson about Pickard's claim, Ashcroft replied, “I never said I didn't want to hear about counterterrorism.”

But the exchange ended there, with no follow-up question. Obviously, either Ashcroft or Pickard was lying—but the commissioners didn't seem to notice this obvious contradiction. Later in his testimony, Ashcroft insisted that he had added more money to the Justice Department's budget for counterterrorism than for any other function. But according to Slate magazine, this claim is patently untrue. “It has been disputed by the commission's staff, several previous witnesses, and public budget documents. Yet none of the commissioners called him on it.” The fact is that in August 2001, Attorney General Ashcroft, had turned down a bureau request for $50 million to beef up its counterterrorism efforts.

Even Commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste, the Democratic former Watergate prosecutor, went easy on the attorney general. He asked why Ashcroft's top five priorities listed in a policy document of May 10, 2001, did not include fighting terrorism. Ashcroft answered that at the May 9 hearings before the Senate Appropriations Committee he had cited terrorism as his No. 1 priority. Ben-Veniste let Ashcroft go unchallenged, even though the commission staff report released just prior to Ashcroft's testimony revealed that a May 10, 2001, budget guidance paper he released made no mention of counterterrorism. Many had predicted before the Ashcroft appearances that the attorney general was so vulnerable on the issue of 9/11 that he might have to be sacrificed as an administration fall guy. But Ashcroft was left unscathed by the commission.

Perhaps the chief embarrassment to the Bush administration during this period of testimony before the commission was the revelations of Richard A. Clarke, the Reagan appointee who was the government's top counterterrorism expert under President Clinton and President George W. Bush. On the CBS television program 60 Minutes, and in dramatic testimony before the 9/11 Commission that electrified the country, Clarke charged that the Bush administration “failed to act prior to September 11 on the threat from al Qaeda despite repeated warnings.” Clarke alleged that the Bush administration received repeated warnings that an al Qaeda attack was imminent, yet it under-funded and subordinated counterterrorism in the months leading up to 9/11—and even after.

Among the casualties of this downgrade was “a highly classified program to monitor al Qaeda suspects in the United States,” which the White House suspended in the months leading up to 9/11, according to Clarke. Clarke went on to claim that the president was improperly attempting to “harvest a political windfall” from 9/11, charging that the administration began making plans to attack Iraq on 9/11—despite its claim that that the terror attack had been engineered by al Qaeda.

Clarke's latter assertion was consistent with earlier reports. CBS News had reported on September 4, 2002, that five hours after the 9/11 attacks, “Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was telling his aides to come up with plans for striking Iraq—even though there was no evidence linking Saddam Hussein to the attacks.” Similarly, then-Secretary of Treasury Paul O’Neill said the administration “was planning to invade Iraq long before the September 11 attacks and used questionable intelligence to justify the war.” Noted earlier in this book is the fact that the commission's official timeline grossly contradicts Clarke's own hands-on, eyewitness account of the government's response to the events of the morning of the attacks, despite the preponderance of evidence for Clarke's version.

National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice emerged as the administration's point person in its efforts to refute Clarke's accusations. In an opinion piece in the Washington Post on March 22, Rice wrote: “Despite what some have suggested, we received no intelligence that terrorists were preparing to attack the homeland using airplanes as missiles, though some analysts speculated that terrorists might hijack planes to try and free US-held terrorists.” This claim was restated on numerous TV talk shows, and Rice elaborated on these assertions in her reluctant testimony before the 9/11 Commission; the National Security Adviser of the United States had agreed to testify under oath about the greatest security breach in modern history only after extreme public pressure.

To its credit, pressure from the commission in connection with the testimony of Rice forced the rather embarrassing release of the President's Daily Briefing (PDB) for August 6, 2001 a document that clearly outlined al Qaeda plans to strike within the United States. The PDB was declassified on Saturday, April 10, 2004. Below is the entire text of the intelligence briefing that was released by the White House. Most remarkable are the chilling revelations in its final two paragraphs:

Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US

Clandestine, foreign government, and media reports indicate bin Ladin since 1997 has wanted to conduct terrorist attacks in the US. Bin Ladin implied in US television interviews in 1997 and 1998 that his followers would follow the example of World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef and “bring the fighting to America.”

After US missile strikes on his base in Afghanistan in 1998, Bin Ladin told followers he wanted to retaliate in Washington, according to a…(redacted portion)…service. An Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) operative told an…(redacted portion)…service at the same time that Bin Ladin was planning to exploit the operative's access to the US to mount a terrorist strike.

The millennium plotting in Canada in 1999 may have been part of Bin Ladin's first serious attempt to implement a terrorist strike in the US.

Convicted plotter Ahmed Ressam has told the FBI that he conceived the idea to attack Los Angeles International Airport himself, but that Bin Ladin lieutenant Abu Zubaydah encouraged him and helped facilitate the operation. Ressam also said that in 1998 Abu Zubaydah was planning his own US attack.

Ressam says Bin Ladin was aware of the Los Angeles operation. Although Bin Ladin has not succeeded, his attacks against the US Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 demonstrate that he prepares operations years in advance and is not deterred by setbacks. Bin Ladin associates surveilled our Embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam as early as 1993, and some members of the Nairobi cell planning the bombings were arrested and deported in 1997.

Al Qaeida members—including some who are US citizens—have resided in or traveled to the US for years, and the group apparently maintains a support structure that could aid attacks. Two al-Qa'ida members found guilty in the conspiracy to bomb our Embassies in East Africa were US citizens, and a senior EIJ member lived in California in the mid-1990s.

A clandestine source said in 1998 that a Bin Ladin cell in New York was recruiting Muslim-American youth for attacks.

We have not been able to corroborate some of the more sensational threat reporting, such as that from a… (redacted portion)… service in 1998 saying that Bin Ladin wanted to hijack a US aircraft to gain the release of “Blind Shaykh” Umar Abd al-Rahman and other US-held extremists.

Nevertheless, FBI information since that time indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.

The FBI is conducting approximately 70 full field investigations throughout the US that it considers Bin Ladin-related. CIA and the FBI are investigating a call to our Embassy in the UAE in May saying that a group of Bin Ladin supporters was in the US planning attacks with explosives.

A few days after her testimony, a damning response to Rice swiftly came from a major new whistleblower, reviewed in an earlier section. In public statements intended to directly contradict Condoleezza Rice's testimony before the commission, Sibel Edmonds revealed that she had previously provided information to the panel investigating the September 11 attacks, which she believes proved that senior officials knew of al Qaeda's plans to attack the US with aircraft months before the strikes happened. In three hours during a closed session with the commission, she reiterated that information was circulating within the FBI in the spring and summer of 2001 that strongly suggested that an attack using aircraft was just months away and the terrorists were in place.

True to form, the Bush administration immediately sought to silence Edmonds, obtaining a gag order from a court as earlier noted. On March 24, 2004, in front of about fifty reporters and a dozen news cameras, Edmonds said “Attorney General John A shcrof t told me ‘he was invoking State Secret Privilege and National Security’ when I told the FBI I wanted to go public with what I had translated from the pre-9 /11 intercepts.”

In an effort to place a popular stamp of approval on the shoddy 9/11 Commission work, Popular Mechanics (PM) in March 2005, published an issue largely devoted to an article entitled “9/11—Debunking the Myths.” The magazine's cover uses the word “lies” instead of “myths” and stated: “Conspiracy Theories Can't Stand Up To The Hard Facts.” But did we get the hard facts? Not according to many 9/11 researchers who studiously combed through the popular magazine's report.

The “senior researcher” for this piece was Benjamin Chertoff. When contacted by reporter Christopher Bollyn and asked if he was any relation to Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff, Benjamin replied, “I don't know.” Yet, when Bollyn contacted Benjamin Chertoff's mother and ask the same question, she promptly replied, “Yes, of course, he is a cousin.” This is just one small example of the deceit which riddles the entire 9/11 case. “This means that Hearst [Corporation] paid Benjamin Chertoff to write an article supporting the seriously flawed explanation that is based on a practically non-existent investigation of the terror event that directly led to the creation of the massive national security department his ‘cousin’ now heads,” Bollyn noted dryly.

Longtime conspiracy writer Joel Skousen said the authors of articles attempting to debunk 9/11 theories use four primary tactics:

• They refuse to mention, much less attempt to disprove, the most irrefutable and damaging evidence.

• They take great delight in debunking only those conspiracy theories that are the weakest or that are planted by other government sympathizers to try and discredit the more credible conspiracy facts.

• They select only those “experts” who agree with the official conclusions.

• They snicker at or mock anyone who suggests that the government might engage in criminal behavior or would cover up crimes in collusion with judges, investigators, prosecutors, media heads and hand-picked commissions.

Skousen noted that these tactics were used extensively in the Popular Mechanics story. “In the March 2005, PM magazine singled out 16 issues or claims of the 9/11 skeptics that point to government collusion and systematically attempted to debunk each one,” he wrote. “Of the 16, most missed the mark and almost half were ‘straw men’ arguments—either ridiculous arguments that few conspiracists believed or restatements of arguments that were highly distorted so as to make them look weaker than they really were. PM took a lot of pot shots at conspiracy buffs, saying that those “who peddle fantasies that this country encouraged, permitted or actually carried out the attacks are libeling the truth—disgracing the memories of the thousands who died that day.’”

Researcher and journalist Jeremy Baker, after pointing out that the PM authors were guilty of “inventing nonsense and distorting data” as well as only challenging “the poorest 9/11 researchers” while ignoring more credible work, characterized the PM article as “a train wreck of disinformation and as conspicuous a propaganda ploy as one could imagine.”

Other serious researchers were just as quick to attack the work of the official 9/11 Commission itself. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed is executive director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development in Brighton, England, and author of the award-winning book The War on Freedom: How & Why America was Attacked: September 11, 2001. After a detailed study of the 9/11 Commission's work, he concluded, “…the National Commission on Terror Attacks Upon the United States has failed dismally to investigate the 9/11 terror attacks in an appropriately credible and critical manner. Huge amounts of relevant historical and contemporary data have been ignored; irrelevant data and narratives have been used to construct an inaccurate chronology of 9/11 and its historical context; the embarrassing and damaging implications of ample evidence, including testimony presented to the commission, have been overlooked; blatantly dishonest testimony contradicting well-documented facts has been uncritically accepted.”

After closely studying the final 9/11 Commission Report, author David Ray Griffin concluded that far from refuting the evidence of government complicity in the attacks, the commission “simply ignored most of it and distorted the rest.” He added, “I suggested that the commission's attempt to defend the US military in particular against [public] suspicion is at best seriously flawed, at worst a set of audacious lies.” Throughout the text of his scholarly study, Griffin repeatedly points out that the commission took great pains to give an account of only those facts that were consistent with the Bush administration's official story.

In a later essay entitled “The 9/11 Commission Report: A 571-Page Lie,” Griffin analyzed the pattern of lying in the report's pages, and provided a long list of 115 omissions and distortions that could be justifiably be portrayed as lies. For reasons of space, these few items should suffice to demonstrate the omissions of the 9/11 Commission:

1. No mention of that fact that several credible sources stated that at least six of the alleged hijackers are still alive—including Waleed al-Shehri, accused of stabbing a flight attendant on Flight 11 before it crashed into the WTC North Tower.

2. The omission of reports concerning Mohamed Atta's fondness for alcohol, pork, and lap dances at odds with the commission's claim that he had become a religious fanatic.

3. No mention of the role of Pakistani Intelligence (ISI), a pivotal element with reported ties to both the 9/11 hijackers and the CIA.

4. No reporting on the blocking of meaningful terrorist investigations by the FBI during both the Clinton and Bush administrations.

5. The total lack of reporting on the 200 Israelis expelled from the US in 2002 as part of a massive spy ring, including five arrested after filming the destruction of the WTC from a New Jersey rooftop.

6. No mention of that fact that the CIA created al Qaeda in the 1980s when former CIA Director and then-Vice President George Bush, Sr., controlled the government following the shooting of President Reagan.

7. Not one word about the close business and social ties between the Bush family and the bin Ladens nor of the fact that about 140 Saudis, including about 40 bin Laden family members, were allowed to congregate by air during the “no fly” period beginning the morning of 9/11.

8. The obfuscation of the evidence that Hani Hanjour was too poor a pilot to have flown an airliner into the Pentagon.

9. The omission of the fact that the publicly released flight manifests contain no Arab names.

10. No explanation of how, within hours of the attacks, FBI agents turned up in hotels, restaurants and flight schools used by the hijackers, and knew where to look.

11. The omission of the fact that fire has never, before or after 9/11, caused steel-frame buildings to collapse.

12. No mention of how it was possible that the South Tower collapsed first even though it had been burning a much shorter time the North Tower and also had less fire.

13. Omission of the collapse of WTC 7—which was not hit by an airplane and which had only small, localized fires—an occurrence that FEMA admitted it could not explain.

14. The omission of the fact that the collapse of the Twin Towers—like that of Building 7—demonstrated at least 10 features suggestive of controlled demolition.

15. No explanation for the claim that the core of the Twin Towers was “a hollow steel shaft,” even though even a cursory examination of the WTC plans showed 47 massive steel columns constituting the core of each tower which should have prevented the “pancake theory” of the collapses.

16. The omission of WTC lease-holder Larry Silverstein's statement that he and the fire department commander decided to “pull” Building 7.

17. No mention of the fact that the steel from “ground zero” was quickly removed from the crime scene and shipped overseas before it could be analyzed for evidence of explosives.

18. Omission of Mayor Giuliani's statement that he had evacuated his temporary command center because he had received word that the World Trade Center towers were about to collapse.

19. No presentation of the fact that President Bush's brother Marvin and his cousin Wirt Walker III were both principals in the company in charge of security for the WTC.

20. . Omission of the fact that there have been no photos released of the reconstructed debris of Flight 77 although this has been standard procedure in past airline disasters.

21. No discussion on how the damage done to the Pentagon was inconsistent with the impact of a Boeing 757 going several hundred miles per hour.

22. Omission of the fact that photos of the Pentagon's west wing's facade prior to its collapse 30 minutes after the strike revealed a hole too small to accommodate a Boeing 757.

23. No mention of all the various testimony that has been used to cast doubt on whether remains of a Boeing 757 were visible either inside or outside the Pentagon.

24. The omission of any discussion of whether the Pentagon had an anti-missile defense system that would have brought down a commercial airliner—even though the commission suggested that the al Qaeda terrorists did not attack a nuclear power plant because they assumed that it would be thus defended.

25. Absolutely no mention of fatal anthrax attacks in the days following 9/11, which involved weapons-grade pathogens obtainable only through the US military and were directed against leading Democrats who might have balked at the anti-terrorist measures within the Patriot Act.

26. Only one small footnote mentioned the “Vigilant Guardian” war games exercises which many feel were responsible for the confusion within the FAA and NORAD on 9/11.

It has been noted here that the 9/11 Commission unilaterally altered the time frame of 9/11 events, ignoring or brushing aside contradicting evidence presented under oath.

Such manipulation may have even reached into some US agencies. Democratic Senator Mark Dayton of Minnesota, noted such inconsistencies during the first congressional hearing on the 9/11 Commission's report. “For almost three years now, NORAD officials and FAA officials have been able to hide their critical failures that left this country defenseless during two of the worst hours in our history,” Dayton declared during a Senate Governmental Affairs Committee hearing. He angrily stated NORAD, “lied to the American people, they lied to Congress and they lied to your 9/11 Commission to create a false impression of competence, communication and protection of the American people.”

He added, “We can set up all the organizations we want, but they won't be worth an Enron [the failed energy corporation] pension if the people responsible lie to us.”

Considering the secret societies’ goal of concentrating power through “globalization,” it was no surprise that the commission's report called for a number of sweeping changes in government structure and policies—all without exception aimed at gathering more power to a centralized authority armed with vastly increased budgets.

Their call for revamping the intelligence community reflected further inconsistency. After detailing the problems the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) has in coordinating various government agencies, the commission commented, “No one person can do all these things.” Their solution? Place all such intelligence operations under the control of one person, a new cabinet-level “National Intelligence Director.”

The final 9/11 Commission Report is chock full of inconsequential and distracting details and backgrounding, filled with gaps and inconsistencies and, over all, merely a clarion call for a more centralized federal government presented as our best protector against further terrorism. No wonder that even some commissioners and even their chief counsel have publicly questioned their own work.

Even if there was no intent to cover up the truth, the commission was never funded at a level sufficient to do its work. Incredibly, more than three times as much money was spent on President George W. Bush's 2005 inauguration than was originally allocated to investigate the attacks on September 11, 2001. Consider that a total of $112.6 million was spent to investigate the 2003 space shuttle Columbia disaster and $50 million was once spent to look into Las Vegas gambling casinos. The investigation of the 9/11 tragedy received a total of $13 million.

The Presidential Inaugural Committee estimated Bush's 2005 inauguration events cost about $40 million, with the federal government and District of Columbia bearing an additional $20 million as the cost of providing security. So the total cost of Bush's 2005 inauguration festivities costs $60 million while a paltry $13 million went to probe the greatest attack on America since 1812.

As in the Kennedy assassination, it is apparent that the federal government cannot be trusted to police itself. Uncovering answers to the many 9/11 mysteries will be left to a grassroots army of private researchers.

Perhaps author David Ray Griffin asked the most pertinent question: “[F]ar from lessening my suspicions about official complicity, [the 9/11 Commission's report] has served to confirm them. Why would the minds in charge of this final report engage in such deception if they were not trying to cover up very high crimes?

Why indeed? What agenda or criminal activity might high-level officials in the US government desire to cover up? To discern a possible answer to this question, attention should be directed to the Middle East.