Like Iraq, the 'Facts' on 9/11 Were 'Fixed around the Policy'

Three facts show that the government "fixed the facts" regarding 9/11 around a policy decision to exonerate the government from any blame whatsoever.

As Daily Kos notes in a recent recommended story, the senior counsel to the 9/11 Commission - John Farmer - states in a new book that the official story of 9/11 "almost entirely untrue".

As I noted last month, he also says:

At some level of the government, at some point in time...there was an agreement not to tell the truth about what happened.

and

I was shocked at how different the truth was from the way it was described .... The [Norad air defense] 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.

If you think that Farmer has gone nuts, you should see what his colleagues on the 9/11 Commission say.

2. The Government Used Communist-Style "Minders" to Intimidate Witnesses

The government used "minders" to intimidate witnesses to the 9/11 Commission. In fact, according to an internal memo:

• Minders “answer[ed] questions directed at witnesses;”
  
  
• Minders acted as “monitors, reporting to their respective agencies on Commission staffs lines of inquiry and witnesses’ verbatim responses.” The staff thought this “conveys to witnesses that their superiors will review their statements and may engage in retribution;” and
  
• Minders “positioned themselves physically and have conducted themselves in a manner that we believe intimidates witnesses from giving full and candid responses to our questions.”

3. The Main Sources of Information Were Not Even Remotely Credible

The fact that people were tortured in order to justify the Iraq war by making a false linkage between Iraq and 9/11 is gaining attention.

Many people are starting to understand that top Bush administration officials not only knowingly lied about a non-existent connection between Al Qaida and Iraq, but they pushed and insisted that interrogators use special torture methods aimed at extracting false confessions to attempt to create such a false linkage.

Indeed, the Senate Armed Services Committee found that the U.S. used torture techniques specifically aimed at extracting false confessions (and see this).

And as Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times:

Let’s say this slowly: the Bush administration wanted to use 9/11 as a pretext to invade Iraq, even though Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. So it tortured people to make them confess to the nonexistent link.

But many people still assume that the basics of the 9/11 Commission Report must be accurate, and based on reliable evidence. However, that is incorrect.

• Much of the 9/11 Commission Report was based upon the testimony of people who were tortured

• At least four of the people whose interrogation figured in the 9/11 Commission Report have claimed that they told interrogators information as a way to stop being "tortured."
  

• One of the Commission's main sources of information was tortured until he agreed to sign a confession that he was NOT EVEN ALLOWED TO READ
  

• The 9/11 Commission itself doubted the accuracy of the torture confessions, and yet kept their doubts to themselves

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