Whitewash

You might reasonably assume that the 9/11 Commission and other government agencies investigated September 11th, and concluded based upon the evidence that Osama Bin Laden and his group of terrorists were solely responsible for that atrocity.

Unfortunately, a quick look at the government's investigations reveals that -- not only has there never been a real investigation -- but the behavior of government representatives in willfully obstructing all attempts at investigation comprises evidence of guilt. Specifically, in all criminal trials, evasiveness, obstruction, and destruction of evidence all constitute strong circumstantial evidence that the accused is guilty or, at the very least, not to be believed. 9/11 is no different.

For example, the former director of the FBI says there was a cover up by the 9/11 Commission.

And the 9/11 Commissioners knew that military officials lied to the Commission, and considered recommending criminal charges for such false statements, yet didn't bother to tell the American people (free subscription required).

Indeed, the co-chairs of the Commission now admit that the Commission largely operated based upon political considerations.

9/11 Commission co-chair Lee Hamilton says "I don't believe for a minute we got everything right", that the Commission was set up to fail, that people should keep asking questions about 9/11, that the 9/11 debate should continue, and that the 9/11 Commission report was only "the first draft" of history.

9/11 Commissioner Bob Kerrey said that "There are ample reasons to suspect that there may be some alternative to what we outlined in our version . . . We didn't have access . . . ." 9/11 Commissioner Timothy Roemer said "We were extremely frustrated with the false statements we were getting" Former 9/11 Commissioner Max Cleland resigned from the Commission, stating: "It is a national scandal"; "This investigation is now compromised"; and "One of these days we will have to get the full story because the 9-11 issue is so important to America. But this White House wants to cover it up". The Senior Counsel to the 9/11 Commission, who led the 9/11 staff's inquiry, said "I was shocked at how different the truth was from the way it was described .... The tapes told a radically different story from what had been told to us and the public for two years.... This is not spin. This is not true."

But let's back up and look at the 9/11 Commission in more detail. Preliminarily, President Bush and Vice-President Cheney took the rare step of personally requesting that congress limit all 9/11 investigation solely to "intelligence failures", so there has never been a congressional probe into any of the real issues involved. The administration also opposed the creation of a 9/11 commission. Once it was forced, by pressure from widows of 9-11 victims, to allow a commission to be formed, the administration appointed as executive director an administration insider, whose area of expertise is the creation and maintenance of "public myths" thought to be true, even if not actually true, who was involved in pre-9/11 intelligence briefings, and who was one of the key architects of the "pre-emptive war" doctrine. This executive director, who controlled what the Commission did and did not analyze, then limited the scope of the Commission's inquiry so that the overwhelming majority of questions about 9/11 remained unasked (see this article and this article). The administration then starved the commission of funds, providing a fraction of the funds used to investigate Monica Lewinsky, failed to provide crucial documents (and see this article also), refused to share much information with the Commission, refused to require high-level officials to testify under oath, and allowed Bush and Cheney to be questioned jointly. More importantly, the 9-11 Commission refused to examine virtually any evidence which contradicted the administration's official version of events. As stated by the State Department's Coordinator for Counterterrorism, who was the point man for the U.S. government's international counterterrorism policy in the first term of the Bush administration, "there were things the [9/11] commission[s] wanted to know about and things they didn't want to know about." For example, the 9-11 Commission report fails to mention the CIA director's urgent warnings to top administration officials in July 2001 of an impending attack (indeed, the 9-11 Commission was briefed on these warnings, but denied they knew about them until confronted with contrary evidence). Moreover, numerous veteran national security experts were turned away, ignored, or censored by the 9/11 commission, even though they had information directly relevant to the commission's investigation.

A very well-documented book by a distinguished professor shows that the 9-11 Commission was a whitewash. According to law professor Richard Falk of Princeton, the author of this book "establishes himself, alongside Seymour Hersh, as America's number one bearer of unpleasant, yet necessary, public truths" (Seymour Hersh, as you might know, is the Pulitzer prize-winning reporter who uncovered the Iraq prison torture scandal). See a synopsis of the book here; and a summary of a portion of the book here. Indeed, the very 9-11 widows who had pressured the administration to create the 9/11 Commission now "question the veracity of the entire Commission’s report", and have previously declared it a failure which ignored 70% of their detailed questions and "suppressed important evidence and whistleblower testimony that challenged the official story on many fronts".

Moreover, the former head of the fire science and engineering division of the agency now investigating the world trade center disaster, who is a professor of fire protection engineering, wrote that the world trade center buildings could not have collapsed due to jet fuel fires, that evidence was being destroyed, and that there was no real investigation into the collapses. He has called for a new investigation. And a leading firefighters' trade publication called the investigation concerning the world trade center a "half-baked farce". In addition, the official investigators themselves were largely denied funding, access to the site and the evidence contained there, or even access to such basic information as the blueprints for the world trade center. Indeed, the blueprints for the world trade center are apparently STILL being withheld from reporters and the public, and the government agency in charge of the investigation has grossly mischaracterized the structure of the buildings. And did you know that investigators for the Congressional Joint Inquiry discovered that an FBI informant had hosted and even rented a room to two hijackers in 2000 and that, when the Inquiry sought to interview the informant, the FBI refused outright, and then hid him in an unknown location, and that a high-level FBI official stated these blocking maneuvers were undertaken under orders from the White House?

Or that a former FBI translator who Senators Leahy and Grassley, among others, have claimed is credible, and who the administration has gagged for years without any logical basis -- has stated that "this administration knowingly and intentionally let many directly or indirectly involved in that terrorist act [September 11th] go free – untouched and uninvestigated"? Or have you heard that the FBI long ago found and analyzed the "black box" recorders from the airplanes which hit the Twin Towers, but has consistently denied that they were ever found?

Or did you know that the tape of interviews of air traffic controllers on-duty on 9/11 was intentionally destroyed by crushing the cassette by hand, cutting the tape into little pieces, and then dropping the pieces in different trash cans around the building as shown by this NY Times article (summary version is free; full version is pay-per-view) and by this article from the Chicago Sun-Times?

And amazingly, many years after the FBI stated it did not have sufficient evidence to prosecute Bin Laden for 9/11, that agency apparently still does not have hard evidence linking Bin Laden to the crime.

Still think the government really investigated and disclosed what happened on 9/11? Indeed, there are even indications that false evidence may have been planted to deflect attention from the real perpetrators.