This
is the LONG version, exclusive to sanderhicks.com
Based
on the short version Originally Published
by the New York Press.
http://www.nypress.com/17/34/books/hicks.cfm
IN THE RECENT documentary
Outfoxed, media critic Robert McChesney
suggests right-leaning news outlets like Fox
News are worse than the Stalinist-era propaganda.
At least in Soviet Russia, he says, people
knew they were getting the official party
line.
The problem of the
9/11 Commission Report is similar. Instead
of being printed by the government that wrote
it, the Report is published by the
employee-owned, independent press W. W. Norton
& Co. The writing style goes out of its
way to appear informal, with occasional references
to Hollywood films or rhetoric about the importance
of civil liberties. Norton's first printing
of 500,000 has already been snapped up, leaving
bookstores nation-wide out of it, in more
ways than one.
The only way to explain
the best-seller status of this dry, stiff
and cynical book is to understand the 9/11
disaster as a national trauma so intense that
the co-dependent American family is still
reaching for anything that will assure it.
The Saudi-Pakistani-Bush Family-CIA connections
aren't as incestuous as they seem, right?
Everybody in the government did everything
in their power to stop it, didn't they? Surely
they couldn't have known about 9/11 and allowed
it to happen to justify their agenda, right?
The Report may
be the most literary work ever authored by
a group of 10. "Tuesday, September 11, 2001,
dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the
eastern United States" is the opener. It's
that undergraduate formula: Start with the
weather. The Report then moves on to
tell a selective conspiracy theory.
The Report
pays lip service to the value of the "investigative
journalists and watchdog organizations." But
the Commission refused to call any 9/11 watchdogs
or investigative journalists to testify. Instead,
they brought in fellow bureaucrats, politicians,
spies and policy wonks who provided a parade
of mind-blowingly dull chatter. When their
witnesses "don't recall" the answers the Commission
accepts that at face value. "Our aim has not
been to assign blame" the Commission confesses
in the Preface.
The 10 D.C. insiders that
make up the Commission did their best not
to look at any of the strange anomalies that
abound around 9/11. On page 20, for example,
the Commission reports that an air defense
controller at the Northeast Air Defense Sector
(NEADS) reacted to the hijackings by asking,
"Is this real-world, or exercise?" The terrorists
somehow knew to strike on the morning that
NORAD, NEADS and the Joint Chiefs of Staff
were preoccupied with three different air
defense drills (operations named things like
"Vigilant Guardian," etc.) Although victim
family member Mindy Kleinberg brought up this
coincidence to them on the first day of hearings,
the Commission only mentions Vigilant Guardian
as an afterthought, buried in the notes section
in the back of the book.
Regarding the background
of Osama bin Laden, the Commission dives head-on
into the history of the terrorist ringleader's
training as a mujahedeen by the CIA: They
deny it.
Bin Laden was the CIA's
point man in Afghanistan in the 80s; he ran
the Maktab al-Khidamar. The MAK was the "primary
conduit," according to MSNBC, for cash, weapons
and CIA intelligence to flow through Pakistan's
mini-CIA, the ISI. Three weeks after 9/11,
the CIA's Bill Harlowe tried to spin that
the CIA never had "any relationship whatsoever"
with Bin Laden. And the 9/11 Commission shows
its cards by trying to repeat the claim: Bin
Laden received "little or no assistance from
the United States" in Afghanistan. The Commission
denies that members of the Bin Laden family
were flown out of the US on September 13th,
before airspace was open.
Before they published
their report, there was something benign about
pointing out the possible conflicts of interest
inside the Commission. Reporting on the amusing
proximity of Commissioners to government and
US and UK intelligence felt like a salacious
digging of dirt. But now that the report is
out, now that it's a best-seller, and none
of the cowardly robot media question it, the
conflicts of interest strike one as criminal.
This 500 page work is rife with outright lies
taken directly from the CIA press office.
The Report publishes
an edited version of the famous August 6,
2001 presidential intelligence briefing. Here
we learn the "FBI is conducting approximately
70 full field investigations throughout the
U.S. that it considers Bin Laden-related."
Seventy different investigations? Then let's
hear about them. But the Report doesn't
go there, let alone discuss FBI whistle-blowers
who tried to investigate Bin Laden-related
terrorists but were smacked down. On page
247, we meet Minneapolis terrorist-to-be Zacarias
Moussaoui, but not Time Person of the
Year Coleen Rowley, the FBI whistle-blower
who couldn't get a warrant from headquarters
on him.
Terrorist financing is
covered, with a guileless, "We don't know
exactly where the money came from" manner.
There is no mention of FBI Special Agent Robert
Wright, who tracked down and seized $1.4 million
of Bin Laden-related funds before 9/11. His
higher-ups fought him every step of the way.
After the carnage of 9/11, Wright understandably
broke down and, through tears, apologized
on C-SPAN to 9/11 victims' families. "The
FBI…allowed 9/11 to happen," he told
the world. "FBI management intentionally and
repeatedly thwarted and obstructed my investigations
into Middle Eastern terrorist financing."
Both Rowley and Wright
point to the FBI's David Frasca, the FBI's
Radical Fundamentalist unit chief. After 9/11,
Frasca was promoted to #3 in charge of Domestic
Terrorism. Frasca is not mentioned in this
Report.
Of the many theories about
9/11, some of the best questions involve the
mysterious Mohamed Atta, subject of the research
of investigative reporter Daniel Hopsicker.
For two years, Hopsicker tracked Atta's final
moves in Florida, including his cocaine and
alcohol binges with temporary girlfriend,
Amanda Keller, at the time a pink-haired stripper.
The flight school that Atta happened to "choose,"
Huffman Aviation in Venice, also enjoys a
sanitized version of its history. Although
flight-school president Rudi Dekkers has a
long criminal history, and owner Wally Hilliard
has ties to GOP Bush family friend Myron DuBain,
Reverend Jerry Falwell and Clinton financier
Truman Arnold, None of this makes its way
into the report. Perhaps because Commissioner
Richard Ben-Veniste is featured in Hopsicker's
2001 book, Barry and the Boys regarding
the CIA's Iran/Contra pilot Barry Seal.
So, let's get this straight:
If you're one of the best 9/11 investigative
journalists, and you risk your own life, getting
death threats in Florida for two years of
rubbing elbows with some extremely creepy
characters, should all of your research be
disqualified just because you found people
who call Clinton's friend Richard Ben-Veniste
a "mob lawyer" in your last book? The Commission's
answer is yes.
Hopsicker, via Keller,
found out Atta enjoyed many different forms
of identification. The 9/11 Commission goes
out of its way to report "the FBI and CIA
have uncovered no evidence…that Atta
held any fraudulent passports." On the same
page, the Commission insouciantly mentions
that Atta was somehow able to talk his way
out of not having a Visa one time when he
was stopped by INS.
The Commission can't ignore
the Saudi/Pak/CIA menage-à-trois that
has been going on since BCCI and the Afghan
civil war. It's just that the most interesting
details on this have been reported by the
international press, and as a rule, the Commission
ignores stories not picked up by the U.S.
media. So, the fact that Pakistani ISI director
General Ahmed wired $100,000 to Mohamed Atta
on September 10 is not covered. The Times
of India and Agence France-Presse reported
it, and General Ahmed was forced to step down
because of it. Stateside, these facts languish
unused. Instead, it's pointed out that General
Ahmed happened to be in D.C. meeting with
Porter Goss and Sen. Bob Graham on the morning
of 9/11. The Commission does cover how Deputy
Sec. of State Dick Armitage (who holds a major
decoration from the Pakistani army) used this
to force Pakistan to help with the invasion
of Afghanistan.
To their credit, the subjects
that the Commission does cover are well researched.
The history and influences of Al Qaeda are
telling factors. It's correctly noted that
the global class divide (not their choice
of words) has become so daunting that terrorism
itself has changed. The global poor used to
hijack planes to call for the release of prisoners.
Now, in increasingly desperate times, terrorists
have crossed over into martyrdom. Of course,
the Commission notes this but doesn't examine
why.
Their toughest critics,
the "9/11 Truth Movement" believe that 9/11
must have been the product of a military stand-down.
Earlier in 2001, 67 jets going off course
were handled by established protocols, so
why couldn't fighter jets be scrambled on
9/11? The Report points out the crucial
difference that morning: The terrorist pilots
turned their transponders off and the planes
were harder to find. The lack of fighter jets
on the morning of 9/11 could be explained,
technically, by this report. But then again,
wait, wasn't NORAD trained to counter the
attack by Soviet Migs? Migs wouldn't be flying
with transponders, either.
The Report amuses
itself with little anecdotes. They claim power
struggles and bureaucratic red tape prevented
the US from seizing or killing Bin Laden before
9/11. The CIA wanted to borrow the Predator
spy plane from the Air Force to spy on the
mastermind, but didn't want to have to pay
for it if it blew up.
The Commission often mentions
the love life of terrorist Siad Al Jarrah
and his European girlfriend, Aysel Senguen,
whom he often went away and visited. It's
a heart-breaking story, especially their last
visit, but at a certain point, you wonder
if it's just in there to fill space.
Narcotics trafficking
by US allies, intelligence operatives and
international assets is a dirty subject. Too
weird for the US media, it's the realm of
internet researchers, academic historians…and
the 9/11 Commission. The report deserves credit
for effectively admitting, late in its findings,
that with newly installed leader, Harmid Karzai,
Afghanistan is exporting an embarrassing amount
of heroin. The Report neither condemns nor
approves, but coolly observes, "the United
States…has largely avoided confronting
the…problem of narco-trafficking."
Among the Commission's
stellar recommendations are the "routinizing,
even bureaucratizing, the exercise of imagination."
Or how about "Recommendation:…attack
terrorists and their organizations." Yes,
master! I especially like the throw-away
cocktail party generalization of "every major
religion will spawn violent zealots." This
stuff is like a small press conspiracy theory
written without an editor! Wait, this IS a
conspiracy theory! Among the kooky theories
out there is the one that terrorists with
box cutters were able to defeat a $400 billion
a year war machine. It's way out-there, man,
sure it's seductive. But the facts don't hold
up.
The Commission recommends
that a passport be required to cross into
Canada and Mexico. The Commission wants an
oversight office to protect civil liberties,
but five pages later, this is effectively
nullified by call for a more centralized,
more powerful police state apparatus. Earlier
in the report, the Commission made a quick
reference to J. Edgar Hoover's harassment
and concentrated assault on the Reverend Martin
Luther King, Jr. and other activists in the
60's. Perhaps if they spent more time and
dug deeper into this subject, the Commission
would realize that an unbridled police state
necessarily damages civil liberties, no matter
what you say you believe.
The Report climaxes
in a grand paean to war-without-end. The enemy
is dehumanized and depoliticized. You can't
"bargain" or "negotiate" with terrorists.
There is "no common ground," they can "only
be destroyed or isolated." In other words,
don't ask yourself how your enemy was created,
or what the enemy believes about its justification.
Don't look at Bin Laden's own statements about
the U.S.'s backing of Israel, and don't consider
the motivating effect when Arab youth in the
poorest countries on Earth watch Palestinian
houses bulldozed on Al Jazeera.
The report's final line
is "we look forward to a national debate on
the merits of what we have recommended, and
we will participate vigorously in that debate."
Ha. A debate is the last
thing the Commission wants. That became evident
when Richard Ben-Veniste came on my segment
of the INN World Report TV program and gave
me stock non-answers in plodding, DC insider
gibberish to the hard questions of 9/11. It
became even more evident when he hurled insults
at me for broadcasting that show without editing
out his tense reaction when I asked him about
his involvement with CIA drug-runner Barry
Seal.
The 9/11 Commission
Report has joined the Warren Report as
one of the greatest cover-ups of all time.
Even if they did just happen to have been
caught off guard on 9/11, high-level personnel
at the FBI, CIA and the Department of Justice
should have been indicted for incompetence.
But if those personnel and their boss in the
White House knew about it, they should all
be indicted and tried in a high court.
Instead, every one of
them is thanked in the preface.
Contact:
Sander
Hicks
Check out some
other of my 9/11
reporting.