Given the apparent "mistakes" related to Zubaydah being represented as an al Qaeda leader, there appears to be some serious revision required in the official account of 9/11. However, realistically, at this late date the information attributed to Zubaydah cannot likely be untangled from the official myth behind the War on Terror and the associated actions of the U.S. government. That's because the torture of Zubaydah was used in support of unprecedented policy changes and actions.
- President Bush personally used the perceived value of Zubaydah's capture and torture to justify the use of the CIA's torture techniques as well as the detention of suspects in secret CIA prisons around the world.
- The U.S. government used the questionable intelligence obtained from Zubaydah in order to justify the invasion of Iraq. Officials stated that the allegations that Iraq and al-Qaeda were linked through training people on the use of chemical weapons came from Zubaydah. There was no independent verification of these claims.
- Zubaydah's torture testimony was also used to justify the use of military tribunals, moving the trial of alleged al Qaeda suspects out of the open civil courts. President Bush asked Congress in a speech in September 2006 to formulate special rules in order to try Abu Zubaydah via military commission in Guantanamo Bay. In fact, in late April 2002 less than one month after Abu Zubaydah's capture, Justice Department officials stated Abu Zubaydah "is a near-ideal candidate for a tribunal trial." Ironically, Zubaydah may be the only leading suspect to never face trial.
- In addition to justifying the use of illegal torture techniques, the Bush administration used Zubaydah's capture as justification to accelerate its domestic spying program. The claim was that it would allow quick action on the phone numbers and addresses seized during Zubaydah's capture.
How can the 9/11 Commission Report stand when one of the main sources for information was crazy, was tortured with a specific technique aimed at extracting false confessions, was never allowed to speak (first or second-hand) to the Commissioners, and was not even affiliated with Al Qaeda or 9/11?
The Other Main Source of Information Was Also Unreliable
The other main source for the Commission -- KSM -- the self-confessed "mastermind" of 9/11, also confessed to crimes which he could not have committed.
He later said that he gave the interrogators a lot of false information -- telling them what he thought they wanted to hear -- in an attempt to stop the torture. We also know that he was heavily tortured specifically for the purpose of trying to obtain false information about 9/11 -- specifically, that Iraq had something to do with it.
So the two main sources for the 9/11 Commission investigation were wholly unreliable.
Government Cover-Up of Unreliability of Witnesses
Moreover, certain government personnel went to great lengths to cover up how unreliable the information was.
9/11 Commission co-chairs Thomas Keane and Lee Hamilton wrote:
Those who knew about those videotapes -- and did not tell us about them -- obstructed our investigation.
The chief lawyer for Guantanamo litigation -- Vijay Padmanabhan -- said that torture of 9/11 suspects was widespread. And Susan J. Crawford -- the senior Pentagon official overseeing the military commissions at Guantà ¡namo -- told Bob Woodward:
We tortured Qahtani. His treatment met the legal definition of torture.
Indeed, 90 of the 92 videotapes that the CIA destroyed related to Abu Zubaydah.
Postscript: The 9/11 Commissioners publicly expressed anger at cover ups and obstructions of justice by the government into a real 9/11 investigation:
- 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, and that the 9/11 debate should continue
- The 9/11 Commission chair said the Commission was
"set up to fail"
- The Commission's co-chairs said that the CIA (and likely the White House) "obstructed our investigation"
- 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"
- 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 (John Farmer) -- who led the 9/11 staff's inquiry -- said "At some level of the government, at some point in time"there was an agreement not to tell the truth about what happened". He also 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."
And the Co-Chair of the official Congressional Inquiry Into 9/11 -- and former head of the Senate Intelligence Committee -- has called for a new 9/11 investigation.
Very high-level intelligence officials have also called the Commission's findings into doubt:
- A 27-year CIA veteran, who chaired National Intelligence Estimates and personally delivered intelligence briefings to Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, their Vice Presidents, Secretaries of State, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and many other senior government officials, and who has for years been a tireless anti-war advocate and critic of imperial foreign policy (Raymond McGovern) said
"I think at simplest terms, there's a cover-up. The 9/11 Report is a joke"
- A 29-year CIA veteran, former National Intelligence Officer (NIO) and former Director of the CIA's Office of Regional and Political Analysis (William Bill Christison) said
"I now think there is persuasive evidence that the events of September did not unfold as the Bush administration and the 9/11 Commission would have us believe (and see this)
- A number of intelligence officials, including a CIA Operations Officer who co-chaired a CIA multi-agency task force coordinating intelligence efforts among many intelligence and law enforcement agencies (Lynne Larkin) sent a joint letter to Congress expressing their concerns about
"serious shortcomings," "omissions," and "major flaws" in the 9/11 Commission Report and offering their services for a new investigation (they were ignored)
- A decorated 20-year CIA veteran, who Pulitzer-Prize winning investigative reporter Seymour Hersh called "perhaps the best on-the-ground field officer in the Middle East", and whose astounding career formed the script for the Academy Award winning motion picture Syriana (Robert Baer) said that
"the evidence points at" 9/11 having had aspects of being an inside job
- The Division Chief of the CIA's Office of Soviet Affairs, who served as Senior Analyst from 1966 -- 1990. He also served as Professor of International Security at the National War College from 1986 -- 2004 (Melvin Goodman) said
"The final [9/11 Commission] report is ultimately a coverup"
- Former Deputy Secretary for Intelligence and Warning under Nixon, Ford, and Carter (Morton Goulder), former Deputy Director to the White House Task Force on Terrorism (Edward L. Peck), and former US Department of State Foreign Service Officer (J. Michael Springmann), as well as a who's who of liberals and independents) jointly call for a new investigation into 9/11
- Former Federal Prosecutor, Office of Special Investigations, U.S. Department of Justice under Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan; former U.S. Army Intelligence officer, and currently a widely-sought media commentator on terrorism and intelligence services (John Loftus) says "The information provided by European intelligence services prior to 9/11 was so extensive that it is no longer possible for either the CIA or FBI to assert a defense of incompetence"
- The Group Director on matters of national security in the U.S. Government Accountability Office said that President Bush did not respond to unprecedented warnings of the 9/11 disaster and conducted a massive cover-up instead of accepting responsibility
- Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense under President Ronald Reagan (Col. Ronald D. Ray) said that
the official story of 9/11 is "the dog that doesn't hunt"
- Several key employees for the defense department say that the government covered up their testimony about tracking Mohammed Atta before 9/11
- The former director of the FBI (Louis Freeh) says there was a cover up by the 9/11 Commission
Some other examples of obstruction of justice into the 9/11 investigation include:
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