I Don’t Want A “9/11 Style Commission,” I Want An Investigation
So Democrats have officially passed legislation to form a “9/11 Style Commission” for the riots we saw on 1/6/2021. Personally, I think it’s a little early for such a commission to be formed. The 9/11 Commission was formed on 11/27/2002, or 442 days after the attacks of 9/11/2001. For this to be accurate to what happened, we would have to wait until 3/24/2022 to form a commission in the first place.
However, if Democrats truly want a commission comparable to what we saw for 9/11, I figured it’s only fair to remind everyone what the 9/11 Commission actually did, and just how little investigation actually took place.
First off, as already established, the investigation was delayed. And it was delayed for one simple reason: The Bush-Cheney administration wanted it to be delayed. Here’s Al Franken — hardly a well-known conspiracy theorist — responding to Sean Hannity’s claim that Democrats didn’t want a 9/11 investigation while also recalling the Republican coverup in his 2003 book Lies And The Lying Liars That Tell Them:
[Hannity] must have been referring to the 10/6/2001, New York Times article “House Votes For More Spy Aid And To Pull In Reins On Inquiry,” which said that “Democrats, who offered their own amendment, continued to push for a commission that would examine the events leading up to September 11 and the failure to stop the attacks.” No, I guess that can’t be it.
But you know, you can’t trust The New York Times like you can trust the Washington Times. I guess Hannity must have been thinking of their 5/24/2002, “Bush Rejects Probe Of 9/11: Will Not Give Up Sensitive Terror Papers.” Wait! Bush “rejects”? That makes it sound like Bush was rejecting the probe instead of the Democrats.
So maybe Hannity was talking about the 5/20/2002, New York Times article “Cheney Rejects Broader Access To Terror Brief.” The article began, “Vice President Dick Cheney said today that he would advise President Bush not to turn over to Congress the August intelligence briefing that warned that terrorists were interested in hijacking airplanes.”
The August memo being mentioned was most likely the infamous 8/6/2001 memo “Bin Ladin Determined To Strike In US.” The memo was made public on 7/22/2004, although it had been leaked as far back as early 2002. The memo warned that Bin Laden could strike the United States using airplanes in the not to distance future. Specifically, the memo stated:
We have not been able to corroborate some of the more sensational threat reporting, such as that from a [classified] service in 1998 saying that Bin Ladin wanted to hijack a US aircraft to gain the release of “Blind Shaykh” ‘Umar ‘Abd ai-Rahman and other US-held extremists.
Eventually, the Bush Administration was eventually forced to address this memo. During her testimony to Congress, then-National Security Advisor (later Secretary Of State) Condoleezza Rice said the memo was “historic in nature,” eight separate times. I’m going to let Al Franken, this time in his 2005 book The Truth: With Jokes, explain why that’s utter nonsense:
If, in fact, the [Presidential Daily Breif] was meant to reflect a “historic” threat, the title would have been “Bin Laden Used To Be Determined To Strike Inside U.S., But Not Anymore!” That would have been historic. That’s the kind of memo you know you don’t have to waste a lot of time following up on.
And why exactly would people bother to prepare historical memos for Bush anyway? It's not like the previous day’s [Presidential Daily Breif] had been titled “Battle Of Trafalgar Ends Threat Of Napoleonic Invasion Of British Isles.”
This is not the only memo George W. Bush had that served as a clue to 9/11/2001. On 7/10/2001, FBI Special Agent Kenneth Williams penned a memo simply known as the “Phoenix Memo,” which was sent to the headquarters of the FBI (the head of the FBI was then-acting director Thomas J. Pickard). The memo warned that a group suspected Islamic terrorists were enrolling in flight schools across the country, specifically for the purpose of attacking America.
Going back to Franken in Lies And The Lying Liars Who Tell Them:
Wait. Must be the 10/21/2002 Newsweek article “Cheney: Investigators, Keep Out.” No, That doesn’t sound too promising. But what about the first sentence? “Dick Cheney played a behind-the-scenes role last week in derailing an agreement to create an independent commission to investigate the 9/11 attacks.” Hmm. Well, what about the article’s last sentence? “There’s just this general philosophical orientation that the less the world knows the better,’ says one GOP staffer.”
Of course, the Bush administration fought a 9/11 commission every step of the way, even though the families of the victims were begging for an independent probe from day one.
I showed you this excerpt for two reasons:
- To remind you all that Sean Hannity is nothing more than a Republican propagandist, and he has been for multiple decades.
- To show you that, even in 2003, it was obvious that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney had something to hide regarding 9/11.
When a 9/11 Commission was actually launched in late 2002, it was only given three million dollars, or $4,404,613.67 in 2021 dollars, to investigate the attack. For context, the Warren Commission which investigated the death of President Kennedy cost the American public $4,418,423, or $25,976,284.24 in 2002 dollars, and $38,138,498.92 in 2021 dollars. Overall, the 9/11 Commission got roughly one-eighth in 2002 dollars and one-ninth in 2021 dollars of the funding the Warren Commission got.
Lack of funds was not the only issue the 9/11 Commission faced, they also ended up lacking basic testimony from people in power at the time. George W. Bush was asked if he would be willing to testify to the 9/11 Commission, to which he refused. As he put it on Meet The Press on 2/8/2004:
This commission? You know, testify? I mean, I’d be glad to visit with them. I’d be glad to share with them knowledge. I’d be glad to make recommendations, if they ask for some.
And visit with them Bush did. He talked to the 9/11 Commission along with Vice President Dick Cheney, despite the 9/11 Commission asking for the two men to testify separately. (Since both men were at different places on 9/11, Bush was in a classroom and had spent the previous night in Flordia hanging out with his brother Jeb while Cheney had spent the entire time in the White House, it was assumed they’d both have different perspectives and information about the events of that day, and that both of their perspectives would be useful for the commission’s goal figuring out exactly what happened.) Neither of the two men were under oath, neither of the two men testified publically, and neither of the two men allowed anyone to record what it was they told the commission.
However, Bush and Cheney were not the only ones who misled the commission. The Pentagon also engaged in massive deception to the investigators. As The Washington Post reported on 8/2/2006:
Some staff members and commissioners of the Sept. 11 panel concluded that the Pentagon’s initial story of how it reacted to the 2001 terrorist attacks may have been part of a deliberate effort to mislead the commission and the public rather than a reflection of the fog of events on that day, according to sources involved in the debate.
Oh, and the article also mentions:
For more than two years after the attacks, officials with NORAD and the FAA provided inaccurate information about the response to the hijackings in testimony and media appearances. Authorities suggested that U.S. air defenses had reacted quickly, that jets had been scrambled in response to the last two hijackings and that fighters were prepared to shoot down United Airlines Flight 93 if it threatened Washington.
In fact, the commission reported a year later, audiotapes from NORAD’s Northeast headquarters and other evidence showed clearly that the military never had any of the hijacked airliners in its sights and at one point chased a phantom aircraft — American Airlines Flight 11 — long after it had crashed into the World Trade Center.
CIA Director George Tenet also was caught lying to the commission. As scoop.co reported on 6/9/2004:
Former CIA Director George Tenet committed perjury in his April 14 [2004] testimony before the 9/11 Commission when he claimed he had not met with President Bush in the month before the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. That misrepresentation in Tenet’s testimony was noted within hours by Agence France-Presse.
Then there were things that the Commission simply could not investigate, because the records had been destroyed. Take Able Danger, a classified military intelligence effort created in 1999 that many people believe first predicted the 9/11 attacks. As Congressman Curt Weldon said on the floor of Congress on 6/27/2005:
Mr. Speaker, I rise because information has come to my attention over the past several months that is very disturbing. I have learned that, in fact, one of our Federal agencies had, in fact, identified the major New York cell of Mohamed Atta prior to 9/11; and I have learned, Mr. Speaker, that in September 2000, that Federal agency actually was prepared to bring the FBI in and prepared to work with the FBI to take down the cell that Mohamed Atta was involved in in New York City, along with two of the other terrorists. I have also learned, Mr. Speaker, that when that recommendation was discussed within that Federal agency, the lawyers in the administration at that time said, you cannot pursue contact with the FBI against that cell. Mohamed Atta is in the U.S. on a green card, and we are fearful of the fallout from the Waco incident. So we did not allow that Federal agency to proceed.
Mohamed Atta was one of the terrorists involved in the hijacking of American Airlines Flight 11, which hit the North Twin Tower. According to Congressman Weldon, Atta was identified by Able Danger on thirteen separate occasions before the attacks of 9/11/2001. The 9/11 Commission was unable to look into Able Danger because the information was revealed in 2005, a year after the Commission had already disbanded. Once the information got out, the Defense Intelligence Agency responded by deleting 2.5 Terabytes of information about the operation. (One terabyte is equal to 1,000,000,000,000 bytes, or one trillion bytes. Meaning, the DIA deleted two and a half trillion bytes of data on Able Danger in hopes of not having any further investigation.)
When Intelligence agent Anthony Shaffer wrote a book that mentioned Able Danger in 2010, titled Operation Dark Heart: Spycraft and Special Ops on the Frontlines of Afghanistan — and The Path to Victory, the Defense Intelligence Agency along with the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Association tried to stop the publication of the book, and succeed in having large amounts of it redacted for having classified information. (Of the 320 pages in Shaffer’s book, they tried to argue that 250 of them contained some amount of classified information.) Whatever Able Danger proved, the intelligence agencies and the United States government want to make sure we never see it.
And Able Danger was not the only example of someone noticing these terrorists before the attacks. Dr. David Graham, a dentist who died in 2006, said that he had met the 9/11 hijackers roughly a year before the attack and tried to report them to the FBI, only for the FBI to ignore him and for him to receive death threats. To quote a KSLA article from October 2007:
Up until his death in September 2006, Dr. Graham insisted someone poisoned him two years earlier, likely with propylene glycol (anti-freeze) as he tried to publish a book. That book claimed he met two 9/11 hijackers a year before September 11th and feared the men intended to target Barksdale Air Force Base.
His death was never investigated, which seems rather odd. Why was he never called to testify? Why did the intelligence agencies ignore him, and why did they want to shut him up? Once again, the 9/11 Commission never told us, and it’s very likely we’ll never truly know.
Why was Philip Marshall, an airline pilot who believed the way the towers fell on 9/11 were impossible without another form of energy inside the towers, never called to testify? Why was Barry Jennings, who was in World Trade Center 7 at the time of its collapse before having his life saved at the last possible moment, never called to testify? Why was Kenneth Johanneman, another person who was located in Building 7 — one of the most mysterious parts about the 9/11 attacks, as the federal government has never provided a full explanation of its collapse — never called to testify? Why did the Bush White House also try and stop independent investigations of the 9/11 attacks during the early days — something done neither by the Roosevelt White House after Pearl Harbor nor the Johnson White House after the death of President Kennedy.
It should be noted that there was a reason why they did not interview in the World Trade Center 7 building — because the report does not make one mention of it. Once again, despite this being easily the most mysterious part of the damage done on 9/11, it is also the part that our government had no interest in investigating. Mind you, the National Institute of Standards and Technology has claimed that it built a model proving that WTC 7 was destroyed as the result of rubble and debris from the Twin Towers. Although this explanation is questionable (why did it only happen in Building 7 — which also had assets that expired on 9/12/2001?), if they can provide evidence to this claim the public would love to see it. However, to this name, the National Institute of Standards and Technology has never released the model it used to examine the fall of World Trade Center 7, because, as they said in 2009:
Pursuant to Section 7(d) of the National Construction Safety Team Act, I hereby find that the disclosure of the information described below, received by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (“NIST”), in connection with its investigation of the technical causes of the collapse of the World Trade Center Towers and World Trade Center Building 7 on September 11, 2001, might jeopardize public safety.
Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, two of the co-chairs of the 9/11 Commission, believed that the commission was set up to fail. As they literally wrote on Without Precedent: The Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission “So there were all kinds of reasons we thought we were set up to fail.”
And two of the co-chairs of the 9/11 Commission weren’t the only ones who felt the Commission was an utter failure. Georgia Senator Max Cleland was so angry at the Bush Administration that he left the Commission in December 2003, saying “the White House has played cover-up.”
Of course, most of the 9/11 Commission appointments were clearly political in nature. Its chairman was Thomas Kean, the former Republican Governor of New Jersey, who had basically no foreign policy experience when Bush appointed him. Of course, the reason why Bush appointed Kean had nothing to do with his own experience in foreign policy, it had to do with the fact that Kean endorsed Bush in 2000. Kean also gave the keynote speech at the 1988 Republican National Convention, the same convention that nominated George W. Bush’s daddy George H.W. Bush to be the Presidential Nomination for the Republican Party.
Of course, Bush did begin by trying to appoint a man with foreign policy experience, I’ll let Franken explain once again:
When political realities finally forced the Bushies to give in, whom did they appoint to head the commission? The families’ choice? Former New Hampshire Senator Warren Rudman, who co-chaired the Hart-Rudman Commission on National Security? No. Rudman had backed John McCain in New Hampshire.
Instead, Bush picked Henry Kissinger. You can tell someone wants to get the truth out above cover-ups, mass killings, and mistakes made at the highest level of government when they appoint Henry Kissinger to lead an investigation.
Critics complained that Kissinger had a history of being overly secretive and had potential financial conflicts of interest. When Kissinger resigned a couple of weeks later, he said it was because he wanted to be secretive about his financial conflicts of intrest.
All of this led to a Commission that nobody under the sun was satisfied with — except for Bush and Cheney. The 9/11 Family Steering Committee, a group of family members of those who died on 9/11, said that the Commission was underfunded and did not answer the questions of the victims.
I do not want a repeat of that, I want an actual investigation into the events of 1/6/2021.
