 |
He declined, but the Commission consisted of appointees with obvious conflicts of interest and was seriously under-funded ($14 million as opposed to the $67 million devoted to investigating Clinton's stray member or $30 million for the space shuttle disaster). Its work was met with resistance from the White House. Bush met with the Commission only on the condition that he be questioned in the Oval Office, jointly with Cheney, and off the record.
|
The 9/11 Commission Report was noteworthy in the fact that it didn't blame anyone for 9/11. Not one person has lost his job because 9/11 happened; even though high-ranking witness after high-ranking witness to the Commission described blunders and missed opportunities leading up to the attacks. Why did the Commission do that? Many of the 9/11 widows are unhappy with the findings and many people have called it a whitewash.
Despite the vast quantity of labor behind it, the 9/11 Commission Report is a cheat and a fraud. It stands as a series of evasive maneuvers that infantilize the audience, transform candor into iniquity, and conceal realities that demand immediate inspection and confrontation.
Because it is continuously engaged in scotching all attempts to distinguish better from worse leadership responses, the Commission can't discharge its duty to educate the audience about the habits of mind and temperament essential in those chosen to discharge command responsibility during crises. It can't tell the truth about what was done and not done, thought and not thought, at crucial turning points.
The Commissioners' immeasurably valuable access to the principals involved offered an extraordinary opportunity to amass material precious to future historians: a commentary based on moment-to-moment reactions to major events.
But the 567 pages, which purport to provide definitive interpretations of the reactions, are in fact useless to historians because a seeming terror of bias transforms query after commissarial query--and silence after silence--into suggested new lines of self-justification for the interviewees.
In the course of blaming everybody a little, the Commission blames nobody--blurs the reasons for the actions and hesitations of successive administrations, masks choices that, fearlessly defined, might actually have vitalized our public political discourse.
The 9/11 Commission was a blatant whitewash, it failed to seriously examine virtually every fact supporting complicity of the US administration.
It ignored the PNAC document, the links between the CIA and Bin Laden, the links between the Bush family and Bin Laden, the links between the CIA and Mohammed Atta, the terror drill exercises that were taking place in the week of 9/11, the collapse of building 7, the molten steel found under the rubble of towers 1, 2 and 7, the evidence of the use of thermite and sulfur, the witness reports of repeated explosions throughout the towers, the lack of flying skills previously displayed by the alleged hijackers, Silverstein's $7 billion insurance payout, the insider trading before 9/11, the mysterious power-downs and evacuations at the WTC prior to 9/11, and the fact that the Bin Laden family were allowed to leave the US just after 9/11 while every US citizen was grounded. The list just goes on and on and on.
