American Conspiracies - Jesse Ventura [97]
The 9/11 Commission Report states that “the Bush Administration had repeatedly tied the Iraq War to September 11th.... The panel finds no al-Qaeda-Iraq tie.” Bush then did some backpedaling, saying: “This administration never said that the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated between Saddam [Hussein] and al-Qaeda. We did say there were numerous contacts....” Meetings, it turned out, between bin Laden and Iraqi Intelligence that took place in Sudan back in the mid-1990s! But one prisoner, Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, was tortured in 2002 until he’d agree to say that al-Qaeda was linked to Saddam (he died suddenly after being transferred from Egypt to another prison in Libya).
The 9/11 Commission was a whitewash from the front, after Bush and Cheney had stonewalled an investigation for more than a year. The fellow named as the first commission chairman was none other than Henry Kissinger, who said no thank you on December 13, 2002, when told that he’d have to disclose his list of private business clients (Kissinger was also busy advising the Bush Administration on how best to go into Iraq). The commission’s executive director ended up being Philip Zelikow, who got a jump on the game by putting together a detailed outline of the final report just as they were starting to investigate! The outline was kept secret from others on the 80-member staff.54 Zelikow decided everything. After all, back in 1998 he’d co-written an essay on “catastrophic terrorism,” which he foresaw “would be a watershed event in American history.... 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.”55 Sound familiar?
Zelikow had also been principal author of a paper aimed at justifying a preemptive strike on Iraq. And he tried, without success, to insert a sentence into the report suggesting repeated communication between al-Qaeda and Iraq.56 Zelikow happened to leave off his resumé the fact that, at Condi Rice’s request, he’d been part of the Bush transition team. But then, he’d coauthored a book with Rice, too. Zelikow engaged in “surreptitious” communications with Karl Rove in the course of the investigation.57 With Zelikow running the show, “there was no hope that the commission would carry out an impartial investigation.”58 It recently came out that there were “minders” from Bush’s team sitting there with the witnesses, answering questions for them and positioning themselves physically in an intimidating manner.59
The 9/11 Commission politely informs us that “conspiracy theories play a peculiar role in American discourse. Whenever there is a particularly surprising, traumatic, and influential moment in our history, people are left with unsettling questions.” As an example, they go on to cite “conspiracy theorists [who] propagate outrageous notions that Kennedy was assassinated by the CIA or some shadowy secret society of the rich and powerful.”
Outrageous notions? I find it outrageous that yet another government-appointed commission allows itself to become part of the cover-up. Especially when they knew damned well that’s what they were doing. “The 10-member commission, in a secret meeting at the end of its tenure in summer 2004, debated referring the matter to the Justice Department for criminal investigation, according to several commission sources. Staff members and some commissioners thought that e-mails and other evidence provided enough probable cause to believe that military and aviation officials violated the law by making false statements to Congress and to the commission.”60
The 9/11 Commission’s Chairman Thomas Kean, and Vice Chair Lee Hamilton, have since come out and said: “... the recent revelations that the C.I.A. destroyed videotape interrogations of Qaeda operatives