It’s frustrating to read Josh Marshall’s suggestion that the reason we don’t have more than one decent non-polemical book on the 9/11 attacks is because the 9/11 Commission Report was “so good that [it drove] others from the field.” As Benjamin DeMott wrote in Harper’s back in October 2004:
…The 9/11 Commission Report, despite the vast quantity of labor behind it, is a cheat and a fraud. It stands as a series of evasive maneuvers that infantilize the audience, transform candor into iniquity, and conceal realities that demand immediate inspection and confrontation. Because it is continuously engaged in scotching all attempts to distinguish better from worse leadership responses, the Commission can’t discharge its duty to educate the audience about the habits of mind and temperament essential in those chosen to discharge command responsibility during crises. It can’t tell the truth about what was done and not done, thought and not thought, at crucial turning points.
And, more specifically:
The most momentous subject before the 9/11 Commission was: What did President Bush know about the Al Qaeda threat to the United States, when did he know it, and if he knew little, why so? The Commission reports that on several occasions in the spring and summer of 2001 the President had “asked his briefers whether any of the threats pointed to the United States.” The Commission further reports the President saying that “if his advisers had told him there was a [terrorist] cell in the United States, they would have moved to take care of it.” Facing his questioners in April 2004, the President said he had not been informed that terrorists were in this country.
Conceivably it was at or near the moment when Bush took this position that the members of the Commission who heard him grasped that casting useful light on the relation between official conduct and national unpreparedness would be impossible. The reason? The President’s claim was untrue. It was a lie, and the Commissioners realized they couldn’t allow it to be seen as a lie. Numberless officials had appeared before the whole body of the Commission or before its aides, had been sworn in, and had thereafter provided circumstantial detail about their attempts—beginning with pre-election campaign briefings in September, through November 2000, and continuing straight through the subsequent months—to educate Bush as candidate, then as president-elect, then as commander in chief, about the threat from terrorists on our shores. The news these officials brought was spelled out in pithy papers both short and long; the documentation supplied was in every respect impressive.22. The papers directed to Bush, including discussion of possible terrorist use of hijacked planes, ranged from National Security Council briefings (e.g., those of March 19, 2001, and May 17, 2001) and National Security Council memos (e.g., that of December 29, 2000) to email direct from Counterterrorism Security Group Chief Richard Clarke to Condoleezza Rice (on March 23, June 28, and June 30, 2001), as well as a blizzard of CIA Senior Executive Intelligence Briefs (SEIBs) bearing such titles as “Bin Ladin Planning High-Profile Attacks” (June 30, 2001). The congressionally appointed U.S. Commission on National Security/21st Century, cochaired by Gary Hart and Warren Rudman, presented its report to the White House in February 2001. The document contained “stark warnings about possible domestic terrorist attacks.” Bush did not meet with either of the cochairs. The officials who did manage to brief Bush in person on these matters included John McLaughlin, the CIA acting deputy director, Ben Bonk, the deputy chief of its Counterterrorist Center, and the outgoing president of the United States.
Nevertheless the chief executive, seated before the Commission, declared: Nobody told me. And challenging the chief executive as a liar entailed an unthinkable cost—the possible rending of the nation’s social and political fabric.
The administration opposed the creation of both the congressional and the independent investigations of the 9/11 attacks, and they were tremendously uncooperative. Bush and Cheney even insisted on testifying together to assure that their stories didn’t conflict with each other.
The Commission may have gotten the big picture right in terms of identifying who the hijackers were, where they were trained, who paid their way, and how they entered the country and ultimately boarded the doomed airplanes. Maybe that part of the report is fairly accurate. But the rest of the report is a complete whitewash that tells us almost nothing we want to know.
“It’s hard for us to come to any other conclusion than that the 9/11 Commission was a political cover-up from the word go,” says Patty Casazza, who lost her husband John in WTC I. “We were so naïve, we had no idea we were going to run into this kind of fight. We just wanted an investigation into the attacks, for safety reasons. And yet it took President Bush fourteen months to agree to the 9/11 Commission. This was the man I’d voted for in 2000, and all of a sudden he was my biggest adversary. I look back, and I think, well, at least we got them to put down their version of the events on record, so you can see where they weren’t being thorough. It was supposed to be a complete account, but it was anything but. If my husband had been run over by a car I’d know more.”
The reason there are no non-polemical books on 9/11 is that the information gathered after the attacks by Michael Chertoff was tightly controlled and remains classified. Independent researchers do not have access to the financial records, flight manifests, and other evidence that the government used to reconstruct the plot. They don’t have access to global wiretaps or intelligence reports from those tracking the terrorists prior to the attacks. Outside researchers can point out inconsistencies, false testimony, and unanswered questions, but they can’t create a non-polemical alternative to the official story because they don’t have the tools needed to do so with credibility.
