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The Myth of the 911 Commision
Wall
Street Journal
August
12, 2006
August
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Commentary
by
Edward Jay Epstein
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IN JULY 2004, the National Commission
on Terrorist Attacks Upon the
United States, popularly known as the 9/11 Commission, published
its
final report. Coming in the midst of the presidential campaign,
it won
the quick endorsement of both candidates and wide acceptance
in the
media. In "Without Precedent," the commission's
co-chairmen, Thomas Kean
and Lee Hamilton, offer an inside account of their investigation
of the
9/11 tragedy.
The book's title is somewhat of a misnomer. There were of
course
dozens of precedents for high-level bipartisan inquiries,
such as the
Warren Commission's investigation of the JFK assassination.
More to the
point, there was a precedent for the investigation of the
9/11 attack:
the Joint Inquiry by the House Permanent Select Committee
on
Intelligence and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
Indeed,
the 9/11 Commission was required to use the Joint Inquiry's
report as
its starting point and to limit itself to fill in what it
had not
already covered.
The most notable difference between these two investigations
was
their public relations-or, in Mr. Kean's and Mr. Hamilton's
apt phrase,
their "public face." The co-chairmen assumed that
it was vital to be
perceived "as having full access to the most secretive
material in the
government."
To build this impression, they recount in the book how they
prevailed
in their battle for information with a secretive Bush administration,
an
evasive military bureaucracy and recalcitrant New York City
officials.
They also had to cultivate the media. So both chairmen appeared
on the
TV talk shows, gave joint press interviews and did everything
possible
to build an aura of openness around the investigation-hoping
to avoid,
as they explained, "the kinds of conspiracy theorizing
that have
followed in the wake of other inquiries." For the commission
to succeed,
Messrs. Kean and Hamilton had to nurture the impression
that the
commissioners had seen all the evidence regarding 9/11 and
had
independently assessed it.
In reality, however, the 9/11 Commission was neither exhaustive
nor
independent. If the investigation had truly been as exhaustive
as
advertised, it would have made a genuine effort to weigh
evidence that
ran counter to its thesis. But it did not. Consider how
the 9/11
Commission dealt with Capt. Scott Phillpott, a high-ranking
naval
intelligence officer who asserted that through data mining
his military
intelligence unit, code-named Able Danger, had identified
Mohamed Atta
as a potential terrorist in 2000 and even had his photograph
on a chart.
Since the staff could not find any such chart in the documents
that
it had obtained from the Pentagon and because Capt. Phillpott's
account
"failed to match up" with the staff's conclusion
that Atta was unknown
to U.S. intelligence prior to 9/11, this putative identification
of Atta
was omitted from the commission's report (and a number of
commissioners
were not informed about it). Later, the Pentagon said that
at least four
other intelligence officers in the unit had confirmed that
they had seen
the photograph of Atta or recalled hearing Atta's name prior
to 9/11.
The Pentagon also explained that one possible reason the
chart with
Atta's photo was missing: the military had destroyed many
Able Danger
records in 2001. To be sure, there were reasons to be skeptical
about
eye-witness accounts, but an exhaustive investigation would
have at
least heard them.
Nor was the 9/11 Commission able to independently evaluate
or verify
crucial information it received from intelligence agencies.
For example,
although the CIA had imprisoned seven al-Qaeda conspirators
who had
planned, directed and coordinated the 9/11 attack, the agency
refused to
give the commission access to the prisoners. In the case
of the Warren
Commission, Chief Justice Warren went to Jack Ruby's prison
cell to
personally question Oswald's killer. In the case of the
9/11 Commission,
the commissioners were not allowed to speak to, see or know
the
whereabouts of conspirators. But the commission could not
even question the
prisoners' CIA interrogators about the way information had
been obtained
from them.
The co-chairmen admit in "Without Precedent" that
they "had no way of
evaluating the credibility of detainee information."
But apparently that
did not discourage them from accepting, essentially at face
value,
information from the prisoners, delivered via a CIA "project
manager,"
if it would fill in gaps in the commission's investigation.
For example,
the CIA reported that one key prisoner, Ramzi Binalshibh,
had said
co-conspirator Atta "did not meet with anyone"
when he went to Prague in
June 2000-even though Binalshibh himself was not in Prague
and had no
first-hand knowledge. He further alleged that on another
two journeys,
Atta went to Spain solely to talk with him and met no other
conspirator-but Binalshibh was not in Spain during all of
Atta's visits.
And, again through the medium of the CIA project manager,
Binalshibh
informed commissioners that Osama bin Laden would not have
allowed Atta
to meet with an Iraqi intelligence officer because the al
Qaeda leader
was upset with Saddam Hussein's treatment of Muslims.
Even though such contributions were indeed unverifiable-particularly
the one that required Binalshibh to read bin Laden's mind-the
9/11
Commission came to rely on this information, giving it the
benefit of
the doubt when conflicting information surfaced. For instance,
when the
commission uncovered CIA documents that threatened to complicate
matters
by dragging Iran into the 9/11 conspiracy (the documents
revealed that
Iran had "apparently facilitated" the travel of
most of the 9/11 "muscle
hijackers" in flights from Afghanistan by not stamping
their passports,
and that Imad Mugniyar, the Hezbollah terrorist group's
infamous chief
of terrorist operations, had flown with the hijackers),
the
commissioners referred the "troubling" matter
to the CIA project
manager.
At that point, the report was only one week away from publication.
The project manager quickly ran the information past the
agency's
prisoners and sent a reply back "just in time for inclusion
in the
Report," Messrs. Kean and Hamilton write. Result: "We
found no evidence
that Iran or Hezbollah was aware of the planning for what
later became
the 9/11 attack." Such CIA feeds permitted the commission
to hew to its
theory that al Qaeda carried out 9/11 with no help from
any outside
party or government.
With this book, Messrs. Kean and Hamilton have shown how
a
government-appointed commission, despite the reality of
a severely limited investigation, managed to create the
appearance of an exhaustive independent investigation and
artfully transformed itself
into an ongoing lobby for the reorganization of the intelligence
establishment. Now that is without precedent.
Mr. Epstein is the author of "Inquest: The Warren Commission
and the
Establishment of Truth," and he is currently writing
a book about the
9/11 Commission.
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