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The 9/11 Commission co-chairs don't believe the 9/11 Commission Report:- 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).
- The co-chairs of the Commission now admit that the Commission largely operated based upon political considerations.
- Chairman Thomas Kean says “I’m upset that [the government] didn’t tell us the truth.”
- Co-chair Hamilton says of the CIA's cover up and destruction of tapes of interrogation of people allegedly connected with 9/11:
"Did they obstruct our inquiry? The answer is clearly yes," says Lee Hamilton, who co-chaired the 9/11 Commission, in the wake of reports the CIA destroyed videotapes of interrogations of two al-Qaida suspects. "Whether that amounts to a crime, others will have to judge," adds Hamilton.
- Hamilton also 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".
- One of the primary architects of the 9/11 Commission Report, Ernest May, said in May 2005, "We never had full confidence in the interrogation reports as historical sources."
- And the high-level attorney 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."
The Co-Chair of the Congressional Inquiry into 9/11 and former Head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Bob Graham, doesn't believe it either. Graham says there was a cover-up orchestrated by the White House:
Senator Bob Graham, the Florida Democrat who is a former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, accused the White House on Tuesday of covering up evidence . . .Postscript: David Ray Griffin sent me the following email after reading a draft of this post, clarifying the various stories about the conflicting timelines of the military's response to the hijacked flights (the first and last points cited above):
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The accusation stems from the Federal Bureau of Investigation's refusal to allow investigators for a Congressional inquiry and the independent Sept. 11 commission to interview an informant, Abdussattar Shaikh, who had been the landlord in San Diego of two Sept. 11 hijackers.
In his book "Intelligence Matters," Mr. Graham, the co-chairman of the Congressional inquiry with Representative Porter J. Goss, Republican of Florida, said an F.B.I. official wrote them in November 2002 and said "the administration would not sanction a staff interview with the source.'' On Tuesday, Mr. Graham called the letter "a smoking gun" and said, "The reason for this cover-up goes right to the White House."
What the 9/11 Commission calls lies by the military are places where officers have contradicted the Commission’s own new story about why the flights were not intercepted, as I explained in the latter half of “Omissions and Distortions” and more briefly in “Flights of Fancy” (in Christian Faith and the Truth behind 9/11) and then again in the first chapter of Debunking 9/11 Debunking. As I show, the idea that the military would have deliberately told the kinds of lies alleged by the Commission makes absolutely no sense. Why? Because the story that the military told in “NORAD’s Response Times” (Sept. 18, 2001), and continued to tell to the 9/11 Commission, got the military only partly off the hook, because it left them vulnerable to the charge that they had either stood-down their standard procedures or had been incredibly incompetent. According to the new story told by the 9/11 Commission, the FAA didn’t even notify the military about Flights 175, 77, and 93 until after they had crashed. This gets the military completely off the hook, at least for those 3 flights. If that had been the truth, it would have been completely irrational for the military to have lied by saying that the FAA had given them notice in time for them to have intercepted the flights. But the 9/11 Commission could handle the contradictions between its new story and the military’s old story only by claiming that the military had made false statements. (And since it was hard to see how the military officers could have been confused, the inference was made that they had lied.)
This is not to say that the story the military had told was true. It is possible that the old story and the new story are both false. Indeed, I believe that to be the case. E.g., the military’s claim that it was not notified until 9:24 about Flight 77 contradicts the FAA memo, sent to to the Commission by Laura Brown on May 22, 2003, stating that the FAA had been in conversation with the military about Flight 77 long before 9:24. So the Commission knew that the military’s story was a lie. It responded by increasing the lie by suppressing the memo and saying that the FAA NEVER notified the military.)
