more than one quarter of all footnotes in the 9/11 Report

[seemslikeadream]

http://deepbackground.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/01/30/624314.aspx

The NBC News analysis shows that more than one quarter of all footnotes in the 9/11 Report refer to CIA interrogations of al-Qaida operatives who were subjected to the now-controversial interrogation techniques. In fact, information derived from the interrogations is central to the Report’s most critical chapters, those on the planning and execution of the attacks. The analysis also shows - and agency and commission staffers concur - there was a separate, second round of interrogations in early 2004, done specifically to answer new questions from the Commission.

[Bolo Boffin]

1. I'll bet there are.

Luckily, Lawrence Wright's The Looming Tower is 100% torture-interrogation free.

[noise]

2. What do you mean?

Wright seems to buy absurd explanations regarding CIA failure to share crucial intelligence with the FBI.

[Bolo Boffin]

3. Hm?

Suggesting that the CIA was trying to turn two of the soon-to-be 9/11 hijackers doesn't sound like Wright doing CIA ass covering to me.

[noise]

4. Hard to know for sure

IMO, Wright is full of it considering the threat level. It doesn't make any sense to focus on turning al Qaeda operatives in a high threat environment. The primary goal should have been to prevent a terrorist attack. From what I recall of the book, Wright also doesn't consider what intelligence the CIA picked up since the 01/00 summit in Malaysia.

[JackRiddler]

8. Is that even worthy of response?

Once again the 9/11 Commission has been taken to a shredder by reality.

What has been the official story of 9/11 since 2004?

What is the exhaustive, authoritative account of the events of September 11th, according to its own authors?

What book has received countless endorsements from current and former officials, politicians from Ron Paul to Jerrold Naddler, members of the power elite and corporate media, the National Book Foundation, celebrities from Alec Baldwin on down?

What is the topic of this thread?

The 9/11 Commission Report. Not the book by Lawrence Wright.

And here it is once again exposed, as it has been every day from the beginning of the Commission itself:

- by the sheer fact that it took the protests of the September 11 families before an investigation was even agreed on by the White House, 14 months after 9/11

- by the attempt to appoint Kissinger (the future Hague prisoner)

- by the outrageous conflicts of interest, above all of the investigative chief Zelikow: Bush regime member, Rice associate, admitted expert in mythmaking and "transformative events"

- by the statements at the outset in 2003 that no blame would be sought, only recommendations made

- by the protestations at the outset that the Family Steering Committee questions would serve as a roadmap for the investigation - which ignored more than 2/3 of those questions

- by Max Cleland's uncivil departure (and the appointment Bush gave him, apparently to shut him up)

- by the totalitarian nature of many of the recommendations (Real ID and my favorite quote: "...the American homeland is the planet")

- by the omissions admitted to even in the text (money trail of little practical significance)

- by the more obvious frauds in the text (one wargame based on a Soviet scenario)

- by its failure to incorporate or deal with the testimonies of Edmonds, Rowley, Wright, Samit, Sharshar, Mineta, except to list a few of them once or twice in a footnote

- by its acceptance of rotten deals with the White House - and a note of thanks at the front

- by the refusal to specify redactions, by the faux-novelistic approach

- by the Able Danger whistleblowers and again, the brush-off by the Commissioners (historically insignificant)

- by the Head Omissioners themselves in their book, admitting they considered recommending a criminal investigation of what they considered false accounts by NORAD, but decided against it so that the report could be presented unanimously

- by the failure to name anyone as accountable, despite painting a picture of widespread incompetence at the middle and lower levels

- and now (contrary to my low expectations of Shenon) by Philip Shenon's apparent finding that Zelikow was checking in with Rove and the White House on a regular basis

- and, of course, by the torture tapes revelations - which even NBC now sees fit to quantify as affecting 1/4 of the report's citations.

The main part of the Report is based on printed summaries, by the Guantanomo captors, of supposed interrogations under torture of supposed prisoners who have never been seen by anyone other than their captors, who supposedly confessed their mastermind roles - the Commission was refused access but cited these documents as though KSM said something, or Ramzi Binalshibh said something...

The OP was about the last item.

And how did an inveterate defender of The 9/11 Commission Report respond? Did he admit the Report is compromised? Did he defend the Report anyway?

No, he immediately referred you to an unrelated book by an independent author, as though it would make up for what we now know about The 9/11 CR.

Now that's what's called a distraction. You should not take the bait. You should not dignify it with response.

[Bolo Boffin]

9. People are being tempted, Jack

The mounting problems of the 9/11 Commission are tempting people who believe far more irresponsible things about 9/11. I just wanted to remind people that a lot of what we know about the leadup to that day does NOT rely on torture interrogations. Wright's Pulitzer Prize-winning book is one example. The list of interviews that he conducted personally take up several pages in the book.

Establishing the true reach of the 9/11 CR's problems is not a distraction. It facilitates fruitful debate about these continuing revelations.

[noise]

11. Ronald Kessler interviewed many high ranking

intelligence officials for his latest book. The access doesn't make the account any more truthful. After all, the 9/11 Commission had more access than anyone and look at what they produced.

Even if you accept that the conspiracy theorists are off in terms of how the facts align, we’ve discovered, in congressional hearings, the memo from early August 2001 that warned that bin Laden was determined to attack us on our own soil. Doesn’t that suggest that there was, in fact, at least some inkling on the part of the government before 9/11 that something was up, and doesn’t that in turn give aid and comfort to the people who think there’s more going on here than we know?

Oh, absolutely. The government’s incompetence and paternalism with regard to sharing this kind of information with the American people are responsible for giving so much rope to these theorists.

So it was your view, after reporting this book, that however evil these men who came from abroad and attacked us may have been, there was a certain amount of culpability within our government on the question of competence?

Nobody can doubt it after watching the parade of catastrophic mistakes. The inability to get bin Laden in Afghanistan, the decision to go to war in Iraq, the absence of weapons of mass destruction, the gross incompetence on the part of our military and state planners to take care of the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq—these are all massive failures of government. They’re not just political failures; they’re institutional failures, and we’re going to be dealing with them long after we’ve changed administrations.


Interview with Wright

I find it rather odd that his conclusion seems to be almost exactly the same as that of the 9/11 Commission. Systemic failures. Incompetence.

[Bolo Boffin]

13. "find it rather odd that his conclusion seems to be almost exactly the same"

Well, if his conclusion is the truth, why would that seem odd to you?

PS: Thanks for the quotes. I really have a hard time reading those and gleaning that Wright is carrying water for this administration, a la Zelikow.

[noise]

14. Wright resorts

to the usual conspiracy theorist labeling. IMO, that is pathetic.

[noise]

12. Good response

Sometimes it is difficult to tell the difference between debunking and authoritarianism.

[whatchamacallit]

5. The more I learn about the hamstrung 911 commission and the destruction of the CIA tapes

the more convinced I am we've been had.

[Bolo Boffin]

6. Oh, come on.

You were pretty well convinced of that LONG before the CIA tapes surfaced. Weren't you?

[whatchamacallit]

7. Sure, but they just keep throwing logs on the fire. n/t

[defendandprotect]

10. How else could you get anyone to admit to the myth of 9/11 than with TORTURE --- ???

[noise]

15. Good article on the use of torture by Coleen Rowley

"Let's tell, let's everybody tell the truth," said our country's former Director of Central Intelligence during his interview on Sunday night's 60 Minutes. But George Tenet is over 5 1/2 years late and still seems to suffer from a terrible case of selective memory that even a $4 million book contract can't remedy. The bulk of the job of refuting and correcting Tenet's story will have to come from former CIA and other intelligence insiders who knew him and the whole of his situation better. (See "An Open Letter to George Tenet and Michael Scheuer's op-ed "Tenet Tries to Shift Blame. Don't Buy It.") I also have a little first-hand experience that contradicts what Tenet has pulled out to explain the post 9/11 need to torture.

Link

She notes that there is a disconnect between Tenet's weird conduct in the lead up to 9/11 and his post 9/11 justification of torture.