The Commission by Philip Shenon details the fraudulence of the 9/11 commission

[BurtWorm]

Starting with the naming of Philip Zelikow as Executive Director.

Ironically, Zelikow was nominated not by the WH or Congressional Repubs but by Slade Gorton, who had recently been ousted as Senator from Oregon in the 2002 elections. Gorton was considered not exactly friendly to the Bushists. The reason he pushed the notoriously arrogant, much-disliked Zelikow, according to Shenon, is that he'd been on the Carter-Ford commission investigating the Florida Election fiasco with him and thought he was meticulous, efficient and "brilliant."

But, while aware that Zelikow co-authored a book on national security with Condi Rice in the 1990s, co-chairs Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton (talk about "brilliant") were allegedly unaware that Zelikow was on the Bush transition team for national security matters and that he had written *the* document arguing against long-standing precedent and in favor of preemption in the months right after 9/11, a document that defined the Bushist push to war with Iraq. Over and over, Zelikow used his position as agenda setter to give air to the preemption doctrine--even going so far as to have conspiracy loon Laurie Mylroie (who saw Iraq behind every act of terrorism against the US, including the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995), in one of the first "expert" witness sessions. And this was AFTER the war had started and it became clear the WMD argument was nothing but gas, so to speak.

Zelikow was also dogged in his defense of Rice--not explicit, but tactical--from criticism in the testimony. A natural-born control freak, he insisted on vetting every piece of information passing through his investigators' hands, and was especially interested in evidence Condi Rice had shoved the Clinton admin's obsession with bin Laden and al Qaeda to the back burner, despite Richard Clarke's persistence in pushing it back to the front.

I'm in the middle of the book right now. It's not perfect. Not very well written--suffering from the reporter's tendency to repeat facts over and over, as if each new chapter is another day's news story. But for such a complex subject matter, maybe that's not such a bad fault after all.

This is an important book. It deserves a wide audience.

You can read more about it here.

[BurtWorm]

1. Kick this thread if you've read this book.

Or if you want to read the book.

[groovedaddy]

2. NY Times review of "the Commission"

Journalists like to talk about the back story, the story behind the story. The back story can be nothing more than vaguely sourced gossip traded among pundits and politicos before they go on talk shows. But sometimes the back story is the real, whole truth, a tale of conniving or official blundering that the headlines can only hint at. Journalists often conceal the whole truth because they need to protect their sources.

Philip Shenon, a reporter in the Washington bureau of The New York Times, set out to get behind the scenes of the 9/11 Commission. The inside story of a government commission doesn’t sound very promising; most commission reports wind up unread on dusty shelves.

When the 9/11 Commission announced its findings in the summer of 2004, the response was by and large respectful. Reprinted as a book, “The 9/11 Commission Report” was an instant best seller, unusual for a document written by committee. But its popularity was owed mostly to a spare, riveting narrative of the shocking events on Sept. 11, 2001, not to its policy recommendations or revelations about official malfeasance. So why go over it all again?

Mr. Shenon is a skillful writer and storyteller as well as a dogged reporter. In “The Commission” he makes bureaucratic warfare exciting, largely because he has a keen grasp of human frailty and folly. He opens with a desperate, almost pathetic scene of Samuel R. Berger, President Bill Clinton’s national security adviser, sneaking documents out of the National Archives.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/04/books/04thom.html

[BurtWorm]

3. The story behind this story is just about as grim

being not just about the politics of accountability for one of the worst disasters in American history, but also about the politics of how that history is getting to be written. Philip Zelikow (who is a historian himself) seems to have made it his business to get the history written according to the neo-con gospel. It really should be written again.

It remains to be seen if Shenon's book is step one toward a proper revision. I'd love to know if anyone in this forum who's read the book has an opinion about that.

[TNOE]

4. I wish the American people

had studied their history and were a lot smarter. They should have never been able to get away with this shit. Of course, common sense would have dictated that too.

Its right there - right out in the open - and yet - everyone acts as if they don't hear or see anything.

[BurtWorm]

5. Speaking of not hearing or seeing anything, I just read that Kean and Hamilton

willfully ignored Zelikow's numerous conflicts of interest--his friendship with Rice, his ongoing communications with her and Karl Rove (which he had asked his administrative assistant to stop keeping records of), his role on the transition team, his role in getting Richard Clarke moved off of counterterrorism, his role in formulating the administration's preemption policy (the "DNA" in the drive to war with Iraq). Their motive, Shenon suggests, was to preserve the illusion of the integrity of the commission. They thought that firing Zelikow would damage the commission's credibility--more than keeping him on it!

[wildbilln864]

7. They should have spoken out about that in press interviews,

threatened to or even resigned to draw attention at the time IMO.

[wildbilln864]

6. k&r! nt