With the country now awash in blue, Daily Kos is suddenly awash in a sea of "Now what?" diaries, which I think makes this a good opportunity to discuss with my fellow Kosters an issue about which I feel very strongly, an issue which I hope will, with the help of a congressional investigation or two, be getting a lot more attention around here and across the nation.
That issue is the repeated attempts by the White House to prevent the creation of, underfund and stonewall the 9/11 Commission, most of which were successful.
Join me below the fold.
Daily Kos, unfortunately, is no stranger to 9/11 conspiracy theories. "Bombs in the buildings," "Israel did it..." We've heard 'em all. And I think a fear of encouraging such theories may be the reason that there hasn't been much discussion here (or nationwide, for that matter) about the woeful and utter inadequacy of the 9/11 Commission Report. However, the failure of the 9/11 Commission is the very reason many such theories exist.
And with whom does the fault for the commission's failures lie? With the White House.
So I plan on this being the first in a long series of diaries that examines the many attempts by the White House to thwart the 9/11 Commission's investigation. It seems to me that many of those attempts have been forgotten by the general public amidst an ever-rising sea of administration fuck-ups and "fuck off"s, or were just never adequately reported in the first place. We need to remind the public. We need to investigate. And we need to impeach. I'm not doing this because I think 9/11 was an "inside job" (I don't), but because this administration's desire to prevent any sort of independent investigation into September 11th is a clear example of the way it has actively worked to make our country less safe.
On January 29th, 2002, at a private meeting between George W. Bush and congressional leaders, the President asked then Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle to limit the investigation into the events of September 11th. Five days earlier, Vice President Dick Cheney had called Daschle and asked the same. Newsweek, on February 4th of that year, explained:
Dick Cheney was on the line, and it wasn't to chitchat. The vice president rarely calls the Senate leader - a Democrat he dismisses as an "obstructionist" - so Tom Daschle knew the topic was important when he hurried into his Capitol office. What he heard was a plea, and a warning. The Senate will soon launch hearings on why we weren't prepared for, and warned about, September 11. The intelligence committee will study the matter, but mostly behind closed doors. Cheney was calling to pre-emptively protest public hearings by other committees. If the Democrats insisted, Bush administration officials might say they're too busy running the war on terrorism to show up. Press the issue, Cheney implied, and you risk being accused of interfering with the mission.
"The Vice President expressed the concern that a review of what happened on September 11th would take resources and personnel away from the effort in the war on terrorism," Daschle later explained. "But clearly, I think the American people are entitled to know what happened and why."
Bush and Cheney, apparently did not think the American people were so entitled.
"[Cheney] led the opposition to the commission with an extreme and vitriolic assault," wrote Kristen Breitweiser in her book Wake-Up Call: The Political Education of a 9/11 Widow. "[He] would call up congressional officials and threaten them, stating flatly that there would be no 9/11 independent commission. Publicly, in his grumbling tone and with his glaring eyes that always shifted down and never made contact with anyone else's, he would ordain that the White House was opposed to any independent-style 9/11 commission because we were a nation at war and could not spare any resources. He was the puppeteer pulling the strings in the background while he placed his phone calls threatening the loss of party support for a re-election campaign, a chairmanship of a prized committee, or administration support for a pet project."
By this point, legislation to create an independent commission to investigate the events of September 11th had been introduced by two pairs of senators. Robert Torricelli (D) and Charles Grassley (R) had proposed to create a twelve member panel with subpoena power. Joe Lieberman and John McCain had proposed a bipartisan, fourteen member panel with subpoena power. [NOTE: These two may come across as good guys throughout this story. They're not.] When White House spokeswoman Anne Womack was asked about the proposals, her response was not suprising: "Right now, the president is focused on fighting the war on terrorism."
Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton, who would eventually became chairman and vice chairman, respectively, of the 9/11 Commission, describe the situation at that time in their book Without Precedent: The Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission:
[T]here was extended debate ... about the need for an independent commission. The chief obstacle was the White House, which argued that ... an independent investigation would distract the government from waging the ongoing war on terrorism. At several points, it appeared that the proposal to create a 9/11 Commission was dead. ... This is when the 9/11 families made their voices heard.
"We wanted an investigation, based on a legal model," 9/11 widow Lorie van Auken later told investigative journalist Peter Lance. "We wanted an investigation with teeth - subpoena power, the ability of the investigators to grill witnesses under oath - a probe that wouldn't be subject to the same political considerations you'd expect from an inquiry up on Capitol Hill."
"I was distressed by [the White House's] level of opposition to an independent commission, a commission that seemed like the ultimate no-brainer to me," wrote Kristen Breitweiser. "An investigation should take place and people should be held accountable. It had nothing to do with Republicans or Democrats. It was simply the most logical and efficient way to make sure we were all safe. After all, if our loved ones were killed in a drunk driving accident, there would have been an investigation. Whenever someone is killed there is an investigation. Three thousand people were killed brutally on 9/11 for the world to witness, and yet the White House didn't want to investigate that? How could anyone oppose a commission investigating the murder of three thousand innocent people? An investigation that would go a long way in making the nation less vulnerable on the day of the next attack - thereby saving innocent lives."
John Dean, in his book Worse Than Watergate, explains:
Because of the lack of White House cooperation with the joint inquiry, the families of 9/11 victims began lobbying Congress to create an independent commission, with subpoena power, to investigate 9/11... Bush and Cheney, of course, objected. When they claimed that such an investigation would hamper the war on terror, USA Today editorially spoke for many when it said, "Nonsense," pointing out that a number of blue-ribbon commissions had investigated the attack of Pearl Harbor by Japan during World War II, so "why isn't it logical, ethical and necessary to get to the bottom of how [the] Sept. 11 attacks could have happened?"
Dean goes on to call the White House's opposition to an independent investigation "arrogant" and "stupid."
To the repeated requests for an independent investigation from family members of 9/11 victims, United States Congressmen and Senators, "[t]his President responds, once again," wrote the editors of The Nation in June of 2002, "by calling for more secrecy in government, more silence from his critics."
I'll leave off there for now. This is my first diary here at Daily Kos (though I've been a reader for a little while now) so some constructive criticism would be appreciated.