“The Commission” by Philip Shenon on the Bush Administration’s Ignoring of 9/11 Warnings

[Time for change]

Philip Shenon’s recent book, “The Commission – The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation”, has been widely touted for its revelation that the Commission’s Executive Director, Philip Zelikow, greatly influenced the results of the investigation through his role as White House mole. Zelikow makes an excellent case for that in his book.

But an even more important issue covered in Shenon’s book is the stark and unexplained efforts made by the Bush administration to ignore all warnings of the 9/11 attacks. The Bush administration’s response to the 9/11 attacks have committed our nation to a monumentally expensive – in terms of human life, loss of our civil rights and international respect, and money – “War on Terror”, with no clear end in sight. Therefore, the Bush administration’s efforts to ignore the warnings of the attacks deserve close scrutiny. This post explores those efforts, as well as the 9/11 Commission’s failure to adequately deal with them, largely drawing from Shenon’s book.


HOW THE COMMISSION SELF-RESTRICTED ITS OWN INVESTIGATION

No discussion of the 9/11 Commission’s failure to document the Bush administration’s failure to prevent the 9/11 attacks would be complete without consideration of how the Commission tied its own hands in its efforts to placate the Bush administration:


Philip Zelikow as Executive Director of the 9/11 Commission

At the heart of the Commission’s placating of the Bush administration was its choosing of Philip Zelikow as the Commission’s Executive Director. Zelikow made sure that he was in control of all aspects of the Commission’s work, especially those aspects involving the accountability of the Bush White House for the 9/11 attacks. Many would argue that Zelikow had more influence on the Commission’s final report than any of the commissioners, including the two co-chairmen, Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton.

I won’t go into the abundant evidence that Zelikow functioned as a White House mole during the investigation, which is thoroughly detailed in Shenon’s book. Suffice it here to recount Zelikow’s relationship to the Bush administration prior to his being named Executive Director of the Commission, which in itself should have disqualified him from his position on the basis of conflicts of interest.

Zelikow’s most well known conflict of interest was his close association with Condoleezza Rice, with whom he had previously co-authored a book. Since Rice’s activities prior to 9/11 clearly were a primary focus of the investigation, that placed Zelikow in a position of investigating his good friend.

Zelikow was also a member of George W. Bush’s transition team. Shenon explains the importance of that fact:

(Richard) Clarke understood that with Zelikow in charge, there was no hope that the commission would carry out an impartial investigation of the Bush administration’s bungling of terrorist threats in the months before September 11… It was not just that Zelikow was a close friend of Rice’s from the First Bush presidency. That was the least of it… Clarke wondered if the commission understood that it was Zelikow who, in his work on Bush’s transition team in early 2001, had been the architect of the demotion of Clarke and his counterterrorism team within the NSC…

In other words, Zelikow as Executive Director would be in a position to investigate the role that he himself played in marginalizing the Bush administration’s most aggressive advocates for taking the terrorist threat seriously.

And lastly, there is that fact that Zelikow, in his role on the Bush transition team, was the primary author of a paper that justified preemptive war, which the Bush administration used a few months later to justify its invasion of Iraq.

Kean and Hamilton presumably did not know much of this history when they hired Zelikow. However, after finding out about it very early in the investigation, they chose to keep him on.


Decision not to subpoena high ranking people

Another important decision that contributed to the failure of the 9/11 Commission to uncover the truth was the decision by the commissioners to not issue subpoenas to certain high ranking officials. The routine issuing of subpoenas should have been a no-brainer. Shenon describes the opinions of the Commission’s Democratic commissioners – with the exception of Lee Hamilton – on that issue:

To Jamie Gorelick, it was obvious: Every request made to the Bush administration for documents or other information should include a subpoena. Subpoenas did not have to be seen as threatening if they were used routinely, she argued: a subpoena was simply evidence of the commission’s determination to get what it needed. She explained there was a “nice” way of doing it… If the commission held off on subpoenas until late in the investigation, she warned, there would be no time to go to court to enforce them. The other Democrats, apart from Hamilton, agreed.

Shenon describes Kean and Hamilton’s attitude on this issue:

But Kean and Hamilton had already made up their minds on this issue, too. There would be no routine subpoenas, they decreed; subpoenas would be seen as too confrontational, perhaps choking off cooperation from the Bush administration…

And not only would the commissioners refuse to issue subpoenas to George Bush and Dick Cheney, but they even gave in to Bush’s demand that he and Cheney talk with the Commission together. That, of course, would ensure that their stories didn’t conflict with each other.

In other words, though the Commission was charged with investigating the events that led up to the 9/11 attacks, they allowed those who were most responsible for those events to dictate crucial rules of the investigation.


Allowing Condoleezza Rice to “run out the clock”

By the time that Condoleezza Rice finally agreed to testify before the 9/11 Commission, she had a lot to answer for. Most important was her failure to take the terrorist threat seriously prior to 9/11. Shenon explains that on the subject of terrorism:

Either she committed nothing to paper or e-mail on the subject… or terrorist threats were simply not an issue that had interested her before 9/11. Her speeches and public appearances in the months before the attacks suggested the latter… Bin laden’s terrorist network was seen by Rice as only a secondary threat, barely worth mentioning…

But if Rice had left almost no paper trail on terrorism in 2001… Clarke wrote down much of what he saw and heard at the White House, almost to the point of obsession when it came to al-Qaeda… a rich narrative of what had gone so wrong at the NSC in the months before 9/11… Repeatedly in 2001, Clarke had gone to Rice and others in the White House and pressed them to move, urgently, to respond to a flood of warnings about an upcoming and catastrophic terrorist attack by Osama bin Laden… But Rice rebuffed Clarke… She told Clarke the al-Qaeda briefing (of Bush) could wait… She pushed Clarke so far away from the center of power that his warnings through 2001 about an imminent terrorist attack could be – and were – ignored.

Given Richard Clarke’s accusations about Rice’s refusal to take terrorism seriously, and given the Presidential Daily Brief of August 6th, titled “Bin laden Determined to Attack Inside the U.S.”, the Commission had a lot of questions to ask of Rice. In particular, they wanted to know if she had notified the Bush administration of the threat prior to August 6th, and why the administration did so little to prepare against an attack even after August 6th. Yet the Commission’s rules limited itself terribly. Shenon explains:

The commission had promised to limit her testimony to a single appearance… Given the time constraints, Rice’s strategy was an obvious one… With the more aggressive Democrats, she would try to run out the clock – talk and talk and talk, giving them no chance to ask follow-up questions before the ten minutes that each of the commissioners had been allotted had run out.

THE AUGUST 6 DAILY PRESIDENTIAL BRIEF (PDB)

Rice’s testimony before the commission on the unimportance of the August 6 PDB

Condoleezza Rice did indeed run out the clock. In response to Democratic commissioner and former Senator Bob Kerrey’s questions about this issue, Shenon describes Rice’s response:

She returned to the point she had tried to make so often before – that the warnings of an attack were so vague in 2001 that there was little for domestic agencies to respond to. “You have no time, you have no place, you have no how”, she said. But Kerry knew that was not true. The August 6 PDB had specified that al-Qaeda was considering domestic hijackings and that there were warnings of terrorist surveillance of buildings in New York. There was a place. There was a how.

No matter. The end result of Rice’s ‘run out the clock’ strategy, according to Shenon, was “By the end of the hearings it seemed a draw”.


The confusing testimony of George Tenet

Of course, Rice wasn’t the only person who had knowledge of the content and importance of the August 6th PDB. The PDB originated from the CIA. Perhaps the CIA Director, George Tenet, could shed some light on the situation.

But Tenet was of no help to the Commission on this issue. At first he steadfastly and incredibly maintained that he did not talk to President Bush during the whole month of August. Then it came out that he had visited Bush at his Crawford ranch in August 2001.

Given the title of the August 6th PDB and what the Commission knew of its content, it was of course not believable that Tenet had not talked to Bush about it during the whole month of August. It was similarly unbelievable that he could not recall making a trip to Crawford Texas to visit with Bush at his ranch, even though it was his first such trip. And finally, the believability of all this is further put into question by the fact that Tenet notes in his memoirs of 2007, “At the Center of the Storm”, that “A few weeks after the August 6 PDB was delivered, I followed it to Crawford to make sure the president stayed current on events”.

So, what was going on with Tenet? Shenon makes a big deal about his unreliability as a witness, saying that the commissioners concluded that either he was perjuring himself to the commission, or else his memory was faulty to the point of dementia.

But it seems to me that there is a very simple explanation, strangely not discussed by Shenon: Tenet was in a terrible bind. If he admitted to his August 2001 discussions with Bush about the terrorist threat, that would be a stark indictment of the Bush administration’s failure to take any steps to address that threat. It was an election year, and Tenet was still working for the Bush administration at the time. It would have taken a good deal of courage to tell the truth. But by 2007, when Tenet finished his memoirs, protecting the Bush administration was no longer a priority for him.


Last minute revelations by the CIA about the August 6th PDB

So, it came down to the last days prior to the due date for the Commission’s report, and the Commission still had no conclusions regarding the Bush administration’s failure to respond to numerous warnings about the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

It was at this point that Zelikow was overheard by one of the Commission’s staffers breaking the Commission’s rules by trying to obtain information from the CIA authors of the August 6th PDB, on his own, in the absence of any witnesses. According to the staffer who heard Zelikow, he used leading questions in an attempt to elicit a response that would clear the Bush administration of blame for its failure to respond to the warnings in the August 6th PDB.

When the rest of the Commission found out about this, some demanded the opportunity to talk to the PDB authors themselves. Zelikow vigorously fought that request, saying that the authors of the PDB were very reluctant to discuss the issue further. But that was one argument that Zelikow lost. Arrangements were made to talk to the PDB authors, “Barbara S” and “Dwayne D”. Here is Shenon’s account of what the Commission found out:

Barbara S. and Dwayne D. were as confused and appalled as anyone over the repeated claims by Rice and others at the White House that the August 6 PDB was simply a “historical” overview of domestic terrorist threats… It was meant to remind President Bush that al-Qaeda remained a dire threat in August 2001 and that a domestic attack was a distinct possibility…

Despite Zelikow’s earlier claim that they had been reluctant to be interviewed the two analysts were willing, even eager, to answer questions about the PDB… Ben-Viste came quickly to understand what Zelikow had been so nervous about: They were contradicting Condoleezza Rice. Despite Rice’s claim that Bush had effectively ordered up the PDB, supposedly a sign of how concerned the president had been about terrorist threats that summer, Barbara S. and Dwayne D. said the PDB was ordered up “in-house” at the CIA in hopes that the White House would pay more attention to the threat…

The PDB was meant to tell the president that the threat was current. The president, they said, should have taken no comfort from the passages in the document – written in the present tense – that referred to “patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.

No matter. As a result of Zelikow’s vehement objections, that information never made it into the Commission’s report.


SEPTEMBER 11: THE FAILURE TO INTERCEPT FLIGHT 77

Of the many failures of the Bush administration on 9/11 itself, one of the strangest was its failure to intercept Flight 77 before it hit the Pentagon. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) testified to the 9/11 Commission that they notified the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) at 9:24 a.m. that Flight 77 was hijacked. NORAD verified that claim in a press release on September 18th, and further verified it in testimony at the 9/11 hearings twenty months later. The question therefore arises as to why NORAD didn’t immediately give an order to scramble planes to intercept Flight 77, since there was still plenty of time to do so. Indeed, since standard operating procedure would require that action, and since that would be the course of action expected of a military intent on preventing an attack on its capital city, the failure of the U.S. military to intercept Flight 77 is a major reason why many people believe that… well, that efforts by the U.S. military to stop the attacks were... not very enthusiastic.


Kean and Hamilton’s explanation

But Kean and Hamilton claim that the FAA lied about their account of Flight 77 in their testimony before the 9/11 Commission, especially with regard to their claim that the FAA notified NORAD at 9:24 that Flight 77 had been hijacked. In their own book, “Without Precedent – The Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission”, Kean and Hamilton explain:

Yet our staff determined that there was no notification to NORAD that American 77 was a hijacking before the crash time at 9:37; instead, at 9:34, there was notification that American 77 was lost ….

These inaccurate notification times explained in part the military’s puzzling account of its own actions on 9/11… At 9:24, NORAD scrambled air force jets from Langley Air Force Base in Virginia, directing them to fly east over the Atlantic Ocean… NORAD claimed that the Langley jets were scrambled in pursuit of United 93 and American 77. Yet that was impossible. At 9:24, NORAD had not yet been notified that American 77 had been hijacked…

So why were air force jets scrambled from Langley at 9:24? … Our staff found that the people at NEADS had been told that American 11 had turned and was headed south toward Washington, when in fact American 11 had already crashed into the World Trade Center. The air force jets from Langley were thus pursuing a phantom aircraft – American 11, not United 93 or American 77.

Get it? In order to explain why NORAD gave an order to scramble jets from Langley at 9:24 (immediately after being notified of the missing Flight 77, according to NORAD) and why planes were up in the air by 9:30, and yet made no attempt intercept Flight 77, Kean and Hamilton claim that NORAD was responding NOT to notification of Flight 77 heading to Washington from the west, but rather to a phantom plane coming from the north. And furthermore, to explain why those planes were nowhere in the vicinity by the time that Flight 77 hit the Pentagon at 9:37, they claim that NORAD mistakenly ordered the planes to fly east over the Atlantic Ocean.

Other than the sheer “Alice in Wonderland” aura of that account, there are numerous additional problems with it. I won’t get into those problems here, but if you’re interested you can read about them in this post, in the section titled “Several problems with Kean and Hamilton’s account”.


Norm Mineta’s account of the few minutes prior to Flight 77 striking the Pentagon

It just so happened that the U.S. Secretary of Transportation, Norman Minetta, was having a conversation with Dick Cheney at the time that Flight 77 was barreling towards the Pentagon. He testified before the 9/11 Commission as to what he observed that day. Here is Mineta’s account:

During the time that the airplane was coming in to the Pentagon, there was a young man who would come in and say to the Vice President, “The plane is 50 miles out.” “The plane is 30 miles out.” And when it got down to “the plane is 10 miles out,” the young man also said to the Vice President, “Do the orders still stand?” And the Vice President turned and whipped his neck around and said, “of course the orders still stand. Have you heard anything to the contrary?”

What orders were the “young man” and Cheney referring to? Kean and Hamilton claim that the FAA never notified anyone of the hijacking of Flight 77. It seems that the failure of the Bush administration to respond to warnings of terrorist attacks in the months preceding 9/11 were repeated on 9/11 itself.


OTHER EVIDENCE OF THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION’S DISINTEREST IN TERRORISM PRIOR TO 9/11

Senator Rudman’s account

Former Republican Senator Warren Rudman knew something about the Bush administration’s response to warnings of the 9/11 attacks, as described by Shenon:

Rudman had firsthand knowledge of how little attention the Bush administration had paid to domestic terrorist threats before 9/11. He had tried to deliver some of those warnings himself to President Bush in early 2001 and, to Rudman’s astonishment, was rebuffed…

Throughout the Clinton administration, Rudman had been one of the Republican members of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, which meant he had been briefed in detail by the CIA about the al-Qaeda threat… Rudman had been co-chairman of a Pentagon-chartered commission on terrorist threats that released a report in January 2001 that predicted a catastrophic terrorist strike on American soil… Rudman had wanted to share those findings with President Bush… But he could not get past Condoleezza Rice… She met with Rudman at the White House, heard his presentations about the committee’s findings, and agreed to pass on his request to see the president. After that, Rudman heard nothing… He contacted Rice’s office again several more times to push for a meeting with Bush… The new president was described as being too busy with other, more pressing issues.

The Zaccarias Moussaoui connection

Another account of totally unexplained lack of interest in terrorist threats by the Bush administration prior to 9/11 comes from Minneapolis FBI agent Colleen Rowley. Minneapolis FBI agents were suspicious that Moussaoui posed a terrorist threat, largely because he sought flight training while expressing no interest in learning how to takeoff or land a plane. Here are excerpts from a memo from Rowley to FBI Director Robert Mueller, in which Rowley describes how FBI headquarters obstructed the efforts of the Minneapolis FBI to obtain a search warrant to search Moussaoui’s computer:

The fact is that key FBI Headquarters personnel whose job it was to assist and coordinate with field division agents on terrorism investigations and the obtaining and use of FISA searches continued to, almost inexplicably, throw up roadblocks and undermine Minneapolis' by-now desperate efforts to obtain a FISA search warrant, long after the French intelligence service provided its information and probable cause became clear. HQ personnel brought up almost ridiculous questions in their apparent efforts to undermine the probable cause. In all of their conversations and correspondence, HQ personnel never disclosed to the Minneapolis agents that the Phoenix Division had, only approximately three weeks earlier, warned of Al Qaeda operatives in flight schools seeking flight training for terrorist purposes!

Nor did FBIHQ personnel do much to disseminate the information about Moussaoui to other appropriate intelligence/law enforcement authorities. When, in a desperate 11th hour measure to bypass the FBI HQ roadblock, the Minneapolis Division undertook to directly notify the CIA's Counter Terrorist Center, FBI HQ personnel actually chastised the Minneapolis agents for making the direct notification without their approval!

Comparisons with the Clinton administration’s efforts against terrorism

In chapter 56, the third to the last chapter in his book, Shenon sums up the findings of the commission with respect to comparison of the relative interests in terrorism of the Clinton and Bush administrations prior to 9/11:

The staff uncovered dozens of instances in which Clinton addressed terrorism, which he described as “the enemy of our generation”… Bush, by comparison, almost never mentioned terrorism in his public speeches… both on the 2000 campaign trail and after he became president. When Bush did refer to it, it was usually in the context of… how it demonstrated the need for a missile defense system against rogue states like North Korea, Iran, or Iraq.

CONCLUSIONS

Thus it is clear that the Bush administration was warned on multiple occasions prior to 9/11, and by multiple sources, of the dangers of a terrorist attack on U.S. soil. Yet in case after case, little or no interest was expressed in those warnings, and nothing was done in response to them. Even on the day of 9/11 itself, the same pattern seemed to hold. So evident are the numerous warnings and failures to respond to them that the very BEST interpretation that could reasonably be given to the Bush administration is that it failed miserably in its (non)-attempt to prevent the worst attack on U.S. soil since 1814.

Yet despite all that, the 9/11 Commission was determined to present a “balanced” report that would not “point fingers” and would do no damage to the Bush administration. Shenon notes in the last three chapters of his book:

The team could see that a direct comparison between the two presidents would annoy, maybe even infuriate, the Bush White House… Zelikow insisted that it (the comparisons between Clinton and Bush) come out – all of it… Zelikow was not backing down, and the comparison between Bush and Clinton came out of the final draft…

Much as the staff felt beaten down by Zelikow, so did the other Democratic commissioners. By the end, they had given up the fight to document the more serious failures of Bush, Rice, and others in the administration in the months before 9/11. Zelikow would never have permitted it. Nor, they realized, would Kean and Hamilton…

The commission’s report did not make the accusation that the White House had most feared: that Bush and his administration had mishandled terrorist threats before 9/11.