Lehman: Commission Purposely Set Up So that 9/11 Staff Had Conflict of Interest

We already knew that the 9/11 Commissioners had conflicts of interest. And we already knew that Philip Zelikow had huge conflicts of interest, which the new book The Commission explores.

But did you know that a 9/11 Commissioner recently said that all of the 9/11 Commission staff had a conflict of interest?

Specifically, 9/11 Commissioner and former Secretary of the Navy John Lehman just said on NBC Nightly news:

“We purposely put together a staff that had – in a way - conflicts of interest" (3:48 into video)

He went on to say:

"All of the staff had, to a certain extent, some conflict of interest" (4:09 into video)

This is important because many people have assumed that -- even if Zelikow and the Commissioners had conflicts of interest -- the staff would at least do a thorough and unbiased job in investigating what happened on 9/11. We now know this is not true.

Indeed, Lehman strongly implies that the Commission was purposely set up so that every single person involved would have a conflict of interest which would prevent them from conducting an honest investigation.

Lehman himself is a textbook example of conflict of interest. In 1998, 9/11 Commission executive director Zelikow published an article in Foreign Affairs, the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations, entitled Catastrophic Terrorism: Imagining the Transformative Event. Some two years later, PNAC picked up the Zelikow language, saying that the campaign to convince the public to allow expanded use of U.S. military force around the world "is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event -- like a new Pearl Harbor". Lehman was a member of PNAC, and a signatory to PNAC's plea for "a new Pearl Harbor". See this video and this essay.

When taken with other facts undermining the Commission's credibility (and see this), Lehman's revelation should completely destroy the idea that there has been any real investigation into 9/11.