The JvL Bi-Weekly for 101508

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Wednesday, October 15th, 2008

Volume 7, No. 18

4 Articles, 22 Pages



(Editor's note: I recommend the following book THE 9/11 CONSPIRACY. The Scamming of America. Catfeet Press, Cartus Publishing Company, 2007. James H. Fetzer, Editor.)

(Editor's second note: Cognitive dissonance has become a very serious government psychology-operation against its own people. It's characteristics are simple. People refuse to deal with ideas that have become government created public's attitude toward catastrophes which their governments have perpetuated. A second characteristic is that when members of the general population are presented with evidence that the government has done terrible things such as attacking its own people by hijacking constitutional rights and effectively acting as if marshal law has been declared, the general public refuses to believe that such a thing could be possible. A third characteristic is that members of the general population say things such as that's a conspiracy theory, or that's un-American to talk like that and the "discussion" ends with "I don't want to look at any evidence. I don't want to talk about this anymore." Seeing this happening on a huge scale and involving every aspect of political life one can be sure that government has been most successful. For example, even such first rate people as Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn do not publish on matters such as the destruction of the World Trade Center towers. This form of cognitive dissonance is referred to as "The Regulating Group-Mind." Here is John McMurtry's paradigm example: "Understanding of the RGM in the first instance proceeds by three basic principles of explanation:

1. Here is a "regulating group-mind" or socially regulating syntax of thought and judgment which

2. locks out all evidence against its assumptions; and

3. blinkers out the destructive effects which reveal its delusions.

Response to 9/11 and the 9/11 Wars are my central paradigm example of the operations of the RGM across classes and borders. Yet the RGM operates on every level, and explains also the paralysis of nations in responding effectively to planetary ecosystem collapse. The RGM may lie behind every systematic social pathology of our era…" (In the book recommended above one can read John McMurtry's extensive discussion of this phenomenon.))





1. Anti-Democratic Nature of US Capitalism is being exposed

2. The Bush Doctrine And the 9/11 Commission Report

3. To Joe Biden: Time for Confession

4. The US Simply Doesn't Get it

1. ANTI-DEMOCRATIC NATURE OF US CAPITALISM IS BEING EXPOSED

(Bretton Woods was the system of global financial management set up at the end of the second World War to ensure the interests of capital did not smother wider social concerns in post-war democracies. It was hated by the US neoliberals - the very people who created the banking crisis)

BY

NOAM CHOMSKY

The simultaneous unfolding of the US presidential campaign and unraveling of the financial markets presents one of those occasions where the political and economic systems starkly reveal their nature.

Passion about the campaign may not be universally shared but almost everybody can feel the anxiety from the foreclosure of a million homes, and concerns about jobs, savings and healthcare at risk.

The initial Bush proposals to deal with the crisis so reeked of totalitarianism that they were quickly modified. Under intense lobbyist pressure, they were reshaped as "a clear win for the largest institutions in the system . . . a way of dumping assets without having to fail or close", as described by James Rickards, who negotiated the federal bailout for the hedge fund Long Term Capital Management in 1998, reminding us that we are treading familiar turf. The immediate origins of the current meltdown lie in the collapse of the housing bubble supervised by Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, which sustained the struggling economy through the Bush years by debt-based consumer spending along with borrowing from abroad. But the roots are deeper. In part they lie in the triumph of financial liberalisation in the past 30 years - that is, freeing the markets as much as possible from government regulation.

These steps predictably increased the frequency and depth of severe reversals, which now threaten to bring about the worst crisis since the Great Depression.

Also predictably, the narrow sectors that reaped enormous profits from liberalisation are calling for massive state intervention to rescue collapsing financial institutions.

Such interventionism is a regular feature of state capitalism, though the scale today is unusual. A study by international economists Winfried Ruigrok and Rob van Tulder 15 years ago found that at least 20 companies in the Fortune 100 would not have survived if they had not been saved by their respective governments, and that many of the rest gained substantially by demanding that governments "socialise their losses," as in today's taxpayer-financed bailout. Such government intervention "has been the rule rather than the exception over the past two centuries", they conclude.

In a functioning democratic society, a political campaign would address such fundamental issues, looking into root causes and cures, and proposing the means by which people suffering the consequences can take effective control.

The financial market "underprices risk" and is "systematically inefficient", as economists John Eatwell and Lance Taylor wrote a decade ago, warning of the extreme dangers of financial liberalisation and reviewing the substantial costs already incurred - and proposing solutions, which have been ignored. One factor is failure to calculate the costs to those who do not participate in transactions. These "externalities" can be huge. Ignoring systemic risk leads to more risk-taking than would take place in an efficient economy, even by the narrowest measures.

The task of financial institutions is to take risks and, if well-managed, to ensure that potential losses to themselves will be covered. The emphasis is on "to themselves". Under state capitalist rules, it is not their business to consider the cost to others - the "externalities" of decent survival - if their practices lead to financial crisis, as they regularly do.

Financial liberalisation has effects well beyond the economy. It has long been understood that it is a powerful weapon against democracy. Free capital movement creates what some have called a "virtual parliament" of investors and lenders, who closely monitor government programmes and "vote" against them if they are considered irrational: for the benefit of people, rather than concentrated private power.

Investors and lenders can "vote" by capital flight, attacks on currencies and other devices offered by financial liberalisation. That is one reason why the Bretton Woods system established by the United States and Britain after the second World War instituted capital controls and regulated currencies.

The Great Depression and the war had aroused powerful radical democratic currents, ranging from the anti-fascist resistance to working class organisation. These pressures made it necessary to permit social democratic policies. The Bretton Woods system was designed in part to create a space for government action responding to public will - for some measure of democracy.

John Maynard Keynes, the British negotiator, considered the most important achievement of Bretton Woods to be the establishment of the right of governments to restrict capital movement.

In dramatic contrast, in the neoliberal phase after the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system in the 1970s, the US treasury now regards free capital mobility as a "fundamental right", unlike such alleged "rights" as those guaranteed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: health, education, decent employment, security and other rights that the Reagan and Bush administrations have dismissed as "letters to Santa Claus", "preposterous", mere "myths".

In earlier years, the public had not been much of a problem. The reasons are reviewed by Barry Eichengreen in his standard scholarly history of the international monetary system. He explains that in the 19th century, governments had not yet been "politicised by universal male suffrage and the rise of trade unionism and parliamentary labour parties". Therefore, the severe costs imposed by the virtual parliament could be transferred to the general population.

But with the radicalisation of the general public during the Great Depression and the anti-fascist war, that luxury was no longer available to private power and wealth. Hence in the Bretton Woods system, "limits on capital mobility substituted for limits on democracy as a source of insulation from market pressures".

The obvious corollary is that after the dismantling of the postwar system, democracy is restricted. It has therefore become necessary to control and marginalise the public in some fashion, processes particularly evident in the more business-run societies like the United States. The management of electoral extravaganzas by the public relations industry is one illustration.

"Politics is the shadow cast on society by big business," concluded America's leading 20th century social philosopher John Dewey, and will remain so as long as power resides in "business for private profit through private control of banking, land, industry, reinforced by command of the press, press agents and other means of publicity and propaganda".

The United States effectively has a one-party system, the business party, with two factions, Republicans and Democrats. There are differences between them. In his study Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age, Larry Bartels shows that during the past six decades "real incomes of middle-class families have grown twice as fast under Democrats as they have under Republicans, while the real incomes of working-poor families have grown six times as fast under Democrats as they have under Republicans".

Differences can be detected in the current election as well. Voters should consider them, but without illusions about the political parties, and with the recognition that consistently over the centuries, progressive legislation and social welfare have been won by popular struggles, not gifts from above.

Those struggles follow a cycle of success and setback. They must be waged every day, not just once every four years, always with the goal of creating a genuinely responsive democratic society, from the voting booth to the workplace.

(The Bretton Woods system of global financial management was created by 730 delegates from all 44 Allied second World War nations who attended a UN-hosted Monetary and Financial Conference at the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods in New Hampshire in 1944.

Bretton Woods, which collapsed in 1971, was the system of rules, institutions, and procedures that regulated the international monetary system, under which were set up the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) (now one of five institutions in the World Bank Group) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which came into effect in 1945.

The chief feature of Bretton Woods was an obligation for each country to adopt a monetary policy that maintained the exchange rate of its currency within a fixed value.)

The system collapsed when the US suspended convertibility from dollars to gold. This created the unique situation whereby the US dollar became the "reserve currency" for the other countries within Bretton Woods.

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2. THE BUSH DOCTRINE & THE 9/11 COMMISSION REPORT

(Both Authored by Philip Zelikow)

BY

DAVID RAY GRIFFIN

Thanks to the interview of Sarah Palin by Charles Gibson of ABC News on September 11, the “Bush Doctrine” has become part of American political discourse much more fully than it was before. Thanks to that interview and the commentary that followed, Governor Palin and millions of other Americans learned of the existence and meaning of this fateful doctrine---fateful because, as New York Times reporter Philip Shenon has pointed out, it was used to “justify a preemptive strike on Iraq.”

Thus far, however, the commentary following that interview has not brought out the fact that the document in which the Bush Doctrine was first fully articulated---the 2002 version of The National Security Strategy of the United States of America (NSS 2002) was written by the same person who was primarily responsible for the 9/11 Commission’s report: its executive director, Philip Zelikow.

This fact constituted an enormous conflict of interest that should, at the very least, keep Americans from referring to the 9/11 Commission as a model to be emulated---as did John McCain this September 15 in suggesting that “a 9/11-type commission” should be set up to study the causes of the recent financial crisis. As Shenon shows in his 2008 book, The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation, Zelikow’s authorship of NSS 2002, in conjunction with his close relationship to the Bush White House that this authorship illustrated, means that when the 9/11 Commission was formed in 2003, he should never have been chosen to be its executive director.

In the first part of this essay, I discuss the Bush Doctrine as articulated in NSS 2002. In the second part, I discuss Zelikow’s authorship of this document. In the third part, I discuss how he, in spite of this authorship, became the Commission’s executive director, and why this was problematic for the credibility of The 9/11 Commission Report.

The Bush Doctrine

According to international law as reflected in the charter of the United Nations, a preemptive war is legal in only one situation: if a country has certain knowledge that an attack by another country is imminent---too imminent for the matter to be taken to the UN Security Council.

Preemptive war, thus defined, is to be distinguished from “preventive war,” in which a country, fearing that another country may some time in the future become strong enough to attack it, attacks that country in order to prevent that possibility. Such wars are illegal under international law. Preventive wars, in fact, belong under the category of unprovoked wars, which were declared at the Nuremburg trials to constitute the “supreme international crime.”

This traditional distinction between “preventive” and “preemptive” war creates a terminological problem, because preventive war, being illegal, is worse than preemptive war, and yet to most ears “preemption” sounds worse than “prevention.” As a result, many people speak of “preemptive war” when they really mean preventive war. To avoid any confusion, I employ the term “preemptive-preventive war” for what has traditionally been known as preventive war.

People known as neoconservatives (or simply neocons), the most powerful member of whom has been Dick Cheney, did not like the idea that America’s use of military power could be constrained by the prohibition against preemptive-preventive war. In 1992, Cheney, in his last year as secretary of defense, had Paul Wolfowitz (the undersecretary of defense for policy) and Lewis (“Scooter”) Libby write the Defense Planning Guidance of 1992, which said that the United States should use force to “preempt” and “preclude threats.” In 1997, William Kristol founded a neocon think tank called the Project for the New American Century (PNAC). In 1998, a letter signed by 18 members of PNAC---including Kristol, Wolfowitz, John Bolton, Richard Perle, Donald Rumsfeld, and James Woolsey---urged President Clinton to “undertake military action” to eliminate “the possibility that Iraq will be able to use or threaten to use weapons of mass destruction.”

Only after 9/11, however, were the neocons able to turn their wish to leave international law behind into official US policy. As Stephen Sniegoski wrote, “it was only the traumatic effects of the 9/11 terrorism that enabled the agenda of the neocons to become the policy of the United States of America.”7 Andrew Bacevich likewise wrote: “The events of 9/11 provided the tailor-made opportunity to break free of the fetters restricting the exercise of American power.”

The idea of preemptive-preventive war, which came to be known as the “Bush doctrine,” was first clearly expressed in the president’s address at West Point in June 2002, when the administration began preparing the American people for the attack on Iraq. Having stated that, in relation to “new threats,” deterrence “means nothing” and containment is “not possible,” Bush dismissed preemption as traditionally understood, saying: “If we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long.” Then, using the language of preemption while meaning preemptive-prevention, he said that America’s security “will require all Americans . . . to be ready for preemptive action.”

Having been sketched in June 2002, the Bush Doctrine was first fully laid out that September in NSS 2002. This document’s covering letter, speaking of “our enemies’ efforts to acquire dangerous technologies,” declares that America will, in self-defense, “act against such emerging threats before they are fully formed.” Then the document itself, saying that “our best defense is a good offense,” states:

“Given the goals of rogue states and terrorists, the United States can no longer rely on a reactive posture as we have in the past. The inability to deter a potential attacker, the immediacy of today's threats, and the magnitude of potential harm that could be caused by our adversaries' choice of weapons, do not permit that option. We cannot let our enemies strike first.”

In justifying this change of doctrine, NSS 2002 argues that the United States must “adapt” the traditional doctrine of preemption, long recognized as a right, to the new situation, thereby turning it into a right of anticipatory (preventive) preemption:



“For centuries, international law recognized that nations need not suffer an attack before they can lawfully take action to defend themselves against forces that present an imminent danger of attack. . . . We must adapt the concept of imminent threat to the capabilities and objectives of today’s adversaries. . . . The United States has long maintained the option of preemptive actions to counter a sufficient threat to our national security. The greater the threat, . . . the more compelling the case for taking anticipatory action to defend ourselves, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy’s attack. To forestall or prevent such hostile acts by our adversaries, the United States will, if necessary, act preemptively.”

With this argument, NSS 2002 tried to suggest that, since this doctrine of preventive preemption simply involved adapting a traditionally recognized right to a new situation, it brought about no great change. But it did. According to the traditional doctrine, one needed certain evidence that an attack from the other country was imminent. According to the Bush Doctrine, by contrast, the United States can attack another country “even if uncertainty remains” and even if the United States knows that the threat from the other country is not yet “fully formed.”

The novelty here, to be sure, involves doctrine more than practice. The United States has in fact attacked several countries that presented no imminent military threat. But it always portrayed these attacks in such a way that they could appear to comport with international law---for example, by claiming, before attacking North Vietnam, that it had attacked a US ship in the Tonkin Gulf. “Never before,” however---point out Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke, who call themselves Reagan conservatives---“had any president set out a formal national strategy doctrine that included [preventive] preemption.”

This unprecedented doctrine was, as we have seen, one that neocons had long desired. Indeed, neocon Max Boot described NSS 2002 as a “quintessentially neo-conservative document.” And, as we have also seen, the adoption of this doctrine was first made possible by the 9/11 attacks. Halper and Clarke themselves say, in fact, that 9/11 allowed the “preexisting ideological agenda” of the neoconservatives to be “taken off the shelf . . . and relabeled as the response to terror.”

Zelikow and NSS 2002

The 9/11 attacks, we have seen, allowed the Bush-Cheney administration to adopt the doctrine of preemptive-preventive war, which the neocons in the administration---most prominently Cheney himself---had long desired. One would assume, therefore, that the 9/11 Commission would not have been run by someone who helped formulate this doctrine, because the Commission should have investigated, among other things, whether the Bush-Cheney administration might have had anything to gain from 9/11 attacks---whether they, in other words, might have had a motive for orchestrating or at least deliberately allowing the attacks. Amazing as it may seem, however, Philip Zelikow, who directed the 9/11 Commission and was the primary author of its final report, had also been the primary author of NSS 2002.

Lying behind Zelikow’s authorship of NSS 2002 was the fact that he was close, both personally and ideologically, to Condoleezza Rice, who as National Security Advisor to President Bush had the task of creating this document. Zelikow had worked with Rice in the National Security Council during the Bush I presidency. Then, when the Republicans were out of power during the Clinton years, Zelikow and Rice co-authored a book together. Finally, when she was appointed National Security Advisor to Bush II, she brought on Zelikow to help with the transition to the new National Security Council. Given that long relationship, Zelikow evidently came to mind when Rice found the first draft of NSS unsatisfactory.

According to James Mann in Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet, this first draft had been produced by Richard Haass, who was the director of policy planning under Colin Powell in the State Department.

Although this draft by Haass is evidently not publicly available, an insight into what it contained might be provided by an address Haass had given in 2000 entitled “Imperial America.”

While Haass called on Americans to “re-conceive their global role from one of a traditional nation-state to an imperial power,” his foreign policy suggestions were very different from those of the neocons. Saying that “primacy is not to be confused with hegemony” and that “[a]n effort to assert U.S. hegemony is . . . bound to fail,” he called for acceptance of the fact that the world in coming decades “will be a world more multipolar than the present one.” Also, insisting that “[a]n imperial foreign policy is not to be confused with imperialism,” which involves exploitation, he stated that “imperial America is not to be confused with either hegemonic America or unilateral America.” In the new world order that he envisaged, “The United States would need to relinquish some freedom of action,” which would mean that it “would be more difficult to carry out preventive or preemptive strikes on suspect military facilities.” He suggested, moreover, that “[c]oercion and the use of force would normally be a last resort.” The United States would instead rely primarily on “persuasion,” “consultation,” and “global institutions,” especially the UN Security Council.

In any case, whatever the exact nature of the draft for NSS 2002 that Haass produced, Rice, after seeing it, wanted “something bolder,” Mann reports. Deciding that the document should be “completely rewritten,” she “turned the writing over to her old colleague . . . Philip Zelikow.”

Given the hawkish tone of the resulting NSS 2002, we might assume that Zelikow was simply taking dictation from Cheney, Rumsfeld, or Wolfowitz. According to Mann, however, “the hawks in the Pentagon and in Vice President Cheney’s office hadn’t been closely involved, even though the document incorporated many of their key ideas. They had left the details and the drafting in the hands of Rice and Zelikow, along with Rice’s deputy, Stephen Hadley.”

It would seem, therefore, that we can take this “quintessentially neo-conservative document,” which used 9/11 to justify exempting the United States from international law, as reflecting Zelikow’s own thinking. This means that, besides being aligned with the Bush-Cheney White House personally (by virtue primarily of his friendship with Rice) and structurally (by virtue of helping her set up the new NSC), he was also closely aligned ideologically with Cheney and other neocons in the administration.

Such a person obviously should not have been put in charge of the 9/11 Commission, given the fact that one of the main questions it should have investigated was whether the Bush-Cheney administration had any responsibility for the 9/11 attacks, whether through incompetence or complicity. Pursuing the possibility of complicity in particular would have required the Commission to ask whether the administration would have had motives for wanting the attacks. Given the fact that Zelikow had authored the document that provided the doctrine of preemptive-preventive warfare desired by leading members of this administration, he would have been one of the worst possible choices to lead such an investigation.

The story of how Zelikow was, nevertheless, chosen to be the executive director has been told by Philip Shenon in The Commission.

Zelikow and the 9/11 Commission

In their preface to The 9/11 Commission Report, Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, the Commission’s chair and vice chair, respectively, said that the Commission “sought to be independent, impartial, thorough, and nonpartisan.” In light of the fact that the 9/11 attacks had occurred during the watch of the Bush-Cheney administration, being “independent” and “impartial” would have meant, above all, being fully independent of this administration.

With Zelikow as its executive director, the 9/11 Commission could have been independent of the Bush-Cheney administration only if the executive director’s role was merely that of a facilitator, meaning a person who did not influence either the Commission’s research or the content of its final report. Some people, in hearing Zelikow described as the 9/11 Commission’s “executive director,” may assume that he had that kind of role. As Shenon has shown, however, nothing could be further from the truth. Zelikow ran the Commission and took charge of the writing of its final report.

With regard to the work of the Commission, Zelikow sought, and largely achieved, total control. He achieved this control through several means.

First, the work of the Commission was done not by Kean, Hamilton, and the other commissioners who, by virtue of appearing on television during the Commission’s open hearings, became the public face of the Commission. The work, instead, was done by the 80-some staff members.

Second, Shenon points out, these staff members worked directly under Zelikow: “Zelikow had insisted that there be a single, nonpartisan staff.” This meant that none of the commissioners would “have a staff member of their own, typical on these sorts of independent commissions.” Zelikow thereby prevented “any of the commissioners from striking out on their own in the investigation.”

Third, none of the commissioners, including Kean and Hamilton, were given offices in the K Street office building used by the Commission’s staff. As a result, “most of the commissioners rarely visited K Street. Zelikow was in charge.”



Fourth, even though the Commission would not have existed had it not been for the efforts of the families of the 9/11 victims, “the families were not allowed into the commission’s offices because they did not have security clearances.”



Fifth, Zelikow made it clear to the staff members that they worked for him, not for the commissioners. He even prevented direct contact between the staff and the commissioners as much as possible. “If information gathered by the staff was to be passed to the commissioners, it would have to go through Zelikow.” Although the commissioners forced Zelikow to rescind his most extreme order of this nature---that the staff members were not even to return phone calls from the commissioners without his permission---he largely, Shenon reports, achieved his goal: “Zelikow’s micromanagement meant that the staff had little, if any, contact with the ten commissioners; all information was funneled through Zelikow, and he decided how it would be shared elsewhere.”

Indeed, Shenon says, Zelikow insisted “that every scrap of secret evidence gathered by the staff be shared with him before anyone else; he then controlled how and if the evidence was shared elsewhere.”

Although the fact that the 9/11 Commission was controlled by someone who was essentially a member of the Bush-Cheney White House was bad enough, even more contrary to the Commission’s alleged independence was the fact that Zelikow had determined its central conclusions in advance. In their 2006 book, Without Precedent, which is subtitled The Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission, Kean and Hamilton claimed that, unlike conspiracy theorists, they started with the relevant facts, not with a conclusion: they “were not setting out to advocate one theory or interpretation of 9/11 versus another.”

They admitted, however, that after Zelikow divided the staff into various teams and told them what to investigate, he told team 1A to “tell the story of al Qaeda’s most successful operation---the 9/11 attacks.”

So, the question that most Americans probably assume to have been one of the 9/11 Commission’s main questions---“Who was responsible for the 9/11 attacks?”---was not asked. The Bush-Cheney administration’s theory was simply presupposed from the outset.

The fact that the Commission’s conclusion had been predetermined was made even clearer by Kean and Hamilton’s admission that an outline of the final report was prepared in advance by Zelikow and his former professor Ernest May (with whom he had previously coauthored a book).

Shenon revealed more about this startling fact. Pointing out that Zelikow and May had prepared this outline secretly, Shenon wrote: “By March 2003, with the commission’s staff barely in place, the two men had already prepared a detailed outline, complete with ‘chapter headings, subheadings, and sub-subheadings.’” When Zelikow shared this document with Kean and Hamilton, they realized that the staff, if they learned about it, would know that they were doing research for a predetermined conclusion.

And so the four men agreed upon a conspiracy of silence. In Shenon’s words:

“It should be kept secret from the rest of the staff, they all decided. May said that he and Zelikow agreed that the outline should be ‘treated as if it were the most classified document the commission possessed.’ Zelikow . . . labeled it ‘Commission Sensitive,’ putting those words at the top and bottom of each page.”



The work of the 9/11 Commission began, accordingly, with Kean and Hamilton conspiring with Zelikow and May to conceal from the Commission’s staff members the fact that their investigative work would largely be limited to filling in the details of conclusions that had been reached before any investigations had begun.



When the staff did finally learn about this outline a year later (in April 2004), some of them began circulating a two-page parody entitled “The Warren Commission Report--Preemptive Outline.” One of its chapter headings was: “Single Bullet: We Haven’t Seen the Evidence Yet. But Really. We’re Sure.”

The point, of course, was that the crucial chapter of Zelikow and May’s outline could have been headed: “Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda: We Haven’t Seen the Evidence yet. But Really. We’re Sure.”

Besides controlling the Commission’s work and predetermining its conclusions, Zelikow also, Shenon says, largely “controlled what the final report would say.”

He could exert this control because, as Ernest May reported, although the first draft of each chapter was written by one of the investigative teams, Zelikow headed up a team in the front office that revised these drafts. Indeed, Shenon adds, “Zelikow rewrote virtually everything that was handed to him---usually top to bottom.”

Given the control exerted by Zelikow over the investigative work of the 9/11 Commission and its final product, it is not inaccurate to think of the report of the 9/11 Commission as the Zelikow Report.

In light of the foreseeable fact that the executive director of the 9/11 Commission would be able to exert such control over its work and final product, how could Kean and Hamilton, knowing that the Commission needed to be---or at least appear to be---independent of the Bush administration, have chosen Zelikow for this position? Did they not fear that his personal, structural, and ideological closeness to the Bush-Cheney administration could easily lead him to be more interested in protecting it from blame than in discovering and publishing the truth about how the 9/11 attacks were able to succeed? That this would not have been an unreasonable fear is shown by the fact that many members of the Commission’s staff, Shenon reports, said that Zelikow’s conflicts of interest resulted in a “pattern of partisan moves intended to protect the White House.”

At least part of the answer as to how Zelikow became the executive director, Shenon reveals, is that Zelikow, in applying for the position, concealed some of his conflicts of interest from Kean and Hamilton.

The résumé he gave them mentioned the book he had co-authored with Rice and his appointment to the White House intelligence advisory board---two conflicts of interest that Kean and Hamilton deemed “not insurmountable.”

But Zelikow’s résumé failed to mention some other problems---most crucially his authorship of NSS 2002. Given the fact that this document had been used to “justify a preemptive strike on Iraq,” as Shenon says, it would have been in Zelikow’s interest “to use the commission to try to bolster the administration’s argument for war---a war that he had helped make possible.”

And in fact, Shenon points out, Zelikow did try to use it for just this purpose, even trying to insert statements into the final report connecting al-Qaeda to Iraq (this being one of few times that Zelikow did not get his way).

Zelikow was also dishonest with the Commission in another way, Shenon reports. Although “Zelikow had promised the commissioners he would cut off all unnecessary contact with senior Bush administration officials to avoid any appearance of conflict of interest,” he had continuing contacts with both Karl Rove and Condoleezza Rice. “More than once, [the Commission’s executive secretary] had been asked to arrange a gate pass so Zelikow could enter the White House to visit the national security adviser in her offices in the West Wing.”



The secretary’s logs also revealed that Rove---who was the White House’s “quarterback for dealing with the Commission” (according to Republican member of the 9/11 Commission John Lehman)--- called the office “looking for Philip” four times in 2003, after which, she said, Zelikow ordered her to quit keeping logs of his contacts with the White House.

Implications for The 9/11 Commission Report

Shenon’s revelations of Zelikow’s close and ongoing relationship with the White House, his authorship of NSS 2002, and his duplicity should make people, at the very least, suspect that The 9/11 Commission Report is less of a truth-seeking than a political document, designed to protect the Bush-Cheney administration.

However, as helpful as Shenon’s book is, it fails to mention an even more serious conflict of interest created by Zelikow’s authorship of NSS 2002: If the Bush-Cheney White House enabled the 9/11 attacks in order to reap foreseeable benefits---such as the Bush Doctrine and carte blanche to attack Iraq (with its enormous oil reserves) and Afghanistan (through which the administration wanted to enable the construction of an oil-and-gas pipeline)---it would have been in Zelikow’s interest to cover up this fact.

In my 2005 book, The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions, I have provided abundant evidence that this is indeed what he did. In my most recent book, The New Pearl Harbor Revisited: 9/11, the Cover-Up, and the Exposé, I have pointed out---in what must be one of the longest footnotes of all time---that Shenon, while revealing many problematic facts about Zelikow’s behavior, failed to mention any of the ways in which the Zelikow Report used dishonesty to support the Bush-Cheney administration’s implausible interpretation of 9/11, according to which the attacks were orchestrated and carried out solely by Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda.

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3. TO JOE BIDEN: TIME FOR CONFESSION
BY

RAY MCGOVERN

Dear Senator Biden,

I don’t have to remind you of the importance of this Thursday’s debate from a political perspective. But as you prepare, I invite you to spare a few minutes to look at the opportunity from a moral and religious perspective. You may wish to examine your conscience regarding how you have acted on key foreign policy issues and reflect on John 8:32: “And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.”

The holy days of religious traditions serve a very useful purpose, if we but take the time to pause and ponder. I write you on Rosh Hashanah, the first of ten days focusing on repentance.

In Judaism’s oral tradition Rosh Hashanah is the day when people are held to account. The wicked are “blotted out of the book of the living,” while the righteous are inscribed in the book of life. Those in the middle are given ten days to repent, until the holiday of Yom Kippur—the solemn Day of Atonement.

If that has a familiar ring to it, Joe, we heard it in as many words at Mass last Sunday in the first reading, from Ezekiel 18: “If one turns from wickedness and does what is right and just, that one will live.”

Same Tradition

At Rosh Hashanah the ram’s horn trumpet blows to waken us from our slumber and alert us to the coming judgment. Rabbi Michael Lerner has been a ram’s horn for me. On Sept. 28, he sent a note addressing forgiveness and repentance.

He encourages us to find a private place to say aloud how we’ve hurt others, and then to go to them and ask forgiveness. “Do not mitigate or ‘explain’—just acknowledge and sincerely ask for forgiveness,” says Rabbi Lerner. He suggests we ask for “guidance and strength to rectify those hurts—and to develop the sensitivity to not continue acting in a hurtful way.”

Again, a familiar ring. Think, Joe, about the instruction we both received as Irish “cradle Catholics.” Surely you will remember the emphasis on examining one’s conscience, confessing, and pledging to “sin no more.” The phrase comes back, clear as a bell; we were to “confess our sins, do penance, and amend our life, Amen.” Remember?

And remember how clean we felt at the end of that therapeutic process? I was reminded of that by Monday’s gospel reading from John 1, in which Jesus says of Nathaniel: “Here is a true child of Israel; there is no duplicity in him.” Just think of how Nathaniel must have felt.

Joe, you can feel that clean; but one cannot short-cut the process. You must first come clean on your role in greasing the skids for President George W. Bush’s war of aggression on Iraq. I use “war of aggression” advisedly, for that is the term used by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson to denote “the supreme international crime, differing from other war crimes only in that it contains the accumulated evil of the whole.”

There is no getting around that—despite the reluctance of church, state, and the Fawning Corporate Media (FCM) to acknowledge it. I imagine that you, as a lawyer, have moments of acute shame over our country’s flouting of international law and the U.N. Charter, duly ratified by the Senate and thus the law of the land.

And there is no getting away from the important role you played in roping Congress into facilitating that war. Were the war not to have killed, injured, displaced hundreds of thousands, your lame circumlocutions regarding your own culpability would be laughable—on a par with, say, some of the recent comments of your rival for vice president. But they are in no way funny.

Fulsome Prose

For my own penance, I made myself read again through your marathon, “in-depth” interview with the late Tim Russert on Apr. 29, 2007. Your comments are notable for two things: (1) periodic sentences that can be diagrammed only by a German philologist with the patience of Job in waiting for verbs and an empty quiver for dangling participles; and (2) lies.

It is not hard to spot the lies half-hidden in the underbrush of euphemism and circumlocution. I do not refer to relatively harmless ones like your firm denial of any interest in running for vice president. I’m talking about the real whoppers—the ones we used to call mortal sins. Despite the goings-on in Washington in recent years, Joe, I don’t believe anyone has actually passed legislation repealing the commandment against false witness. It’s time you come clean.

Confess What?

--For some reason, you were calling for an invasion of Iraq and making unsupported claims about its “weapons of mass destruction” even before President George W. Bush came into office. Later, on Aug. 4, 2002, after it had become clear to many of us that Bush was intent on attacking Iraq, you declared that the U.S. was probably going to war. That was three weeks before Vice President Dick Cheney voiced his spurious “intelligence” and set the terms of reference for the war. And it was a month before the administration launched its marketing campaign for the new “product.”

--You became the administration’s most important congressional backer of Bush’s preemptive-with-nothing-to-preempt war advocated by neoconservatives and various oil-thirsty functionaries.

--Former U.N. weapons inspector and ex-U.S. Marine Major Scott Ritter was correct in describing the hearings you chaired during the summer and fall of 2002, from which you were careful to exclude Ritter and other expert witnesses, as a “sham…to provide political cover for a massive military attack on Iraq.” What the country needed was an appropriately skeptical Sen. William Fulbright who listened to dissenters after he got burned on Vietnam. Instead, you took unusual pains to ensure that those dissenting on Iraq would not get a fair hearing.

--Ritter: “While we were never able to provide 100 percent certainty regarding the disposition of Iraq’s proscribed weaponry, we did ascertain a 90-95 percent level of verified disarmament…It is clear that Sen. Biden and his colleagues have no interest in such facts.” Indeed, just before the Senate voted to give Bush authorization to attack Iraq, you plagiarized Cheney in assuring your Senate colleagues that Iraq “possesses chemical and biological weapons and is seeking nuclear weapons.”

--And why, tell us, Joe, why did you join Sen. John McCain and others in voting against the amendment offered by Sen. Carl Levin that would have forced the president to obtain U.N. Security Council approval before launching war on Iraq?

‘Explaining’ the Unexplainable

--Then, in 2007, when your catastrophic misjudgments were obvious and hundreds of thousands were dead and maimed, you borrowed administration rhetoric to “explain” to Russert how “everyone in the world thought Saddam had them [WMD].” That was rank hyperbole. When you added, “The weapons inspectors said he had them,” that was a lie.

--Please, no more torturous explanations of the kind you gave Russert; I mean like this one: “It [the resolution] allowed the president to go to war. It did not authorize him to go to it.” Come on, Joe. The resolution says: “The president is authorized to use the armed forces of the United States as he determines to be necessary and appropriate.” Sen. Robert Byrd who, unlike you and other Senate Democrats, had no presidential ambitions, rightly observed at the time that those who “voted for a use-of-force resolution handed a ‘blank check’ to the president.”

--When the war/occupation brought bloody chaos, you expressed regret only that the Bush people weren’t doing it right. For example, in 2004 you told Charlie Rose and in 2007 Russert: “If I’d known that they were going to be so incompetent in using it, I would have never, ever given them the authority.” So you approve of preemptive war as long as no one botches the job?

--More recently, Joe, you have said of your vote to authorize the war: “It was a mistake. I regret my vote.” Pardon the comparison, but you sound like the disgraced Colin Powell, who has expressed regret only for the “blot” on his record. But wait, Joe: “Imagine All the People.”

Im-Palin Old Joe

If you do not find my suggestion for confession and repentance morally compelling, Joe, then think of it this way. Your debate partner on Thursday evening will be loaded for bear. I assume you wish to avoid being field dressed.

Ain’t no way out of your dilemma but by making a clean breast of it, Joe. She is going to wave her finger at you and quote your fulsome remarks at length—no stranger she to dangling participles. She will do a John Kerry on you, which worked so well four years ago. You were for the war before you were against it, she will wink. And she will have a field day, if not a field dressing.

I don’t know what your motives were in giving the president permission to attack Iraq—whether it was the neoconservative-cum-Israel-lobby cabal, the Cheney notion that the only way to ensure the supply of foreign oil is to control it, or a calculated move to ensure your viability as a candidate for president (the kind of thinking that turned out to be, deservedly, the kiss of death for Sen. Hillary Clinton). You had more luck, landing on your feet—sort of.

But you are a “grave and growing” danger (so to speak) to the campaign of Sen. Obama; that is, unless you mount a (God forgive me) “preemptive attack.” And you have only two days—not ten—in which to prepare. It will not wait for Yom Kippur.

Here’s What You Do…

…and it makes sense from a practical, as well as a moral, point of view. Forget the natural inclination to try to defend the indefensible on your cheerleading for the war. To claim you were fooled by the administration, after almost 30 years in the Senate is not going to be any more persuasive or exculpatory than to cite what other pressures you may have yielded to.

Here’s an idea that might not have occurred to you, since it involves a practice that has been out of vogue for so long. Shock everyone by telling the truth! (But briefly, please.)

Some suggested text:

Gov. Palin, I feel terrible about the role I played in helping President Bush launch this godforsaken war. I confess; it was a terrible decision. I apologize to you and to other mothers whose children have been sent to Iraq, to the hundreds of thousands who have died and been injured, to all Americans and all Iraqis. And I ask for forgiveness. I have learned a painful but powerful lesson; you can count on me never letting that kind of thing happen again.

Heed Rabbi Lerner’s caution: “Do not mitigate or ‘explain’—just acknowledge and sincerely ask for forgiveness.”

Now, Joe, to be quite honest, I cannot guarantee a good result from this kind of approach, since I have no empirical evidence. That is, although I’ve been in Washington 45 years, I’ve not seen unvarnished honesty ever risked in quite this way. But I am guessing it could be quite disarming, and could send your debate partner scurrying for less effective talking points.

You will be debating a “fundamentalist,” but that is actually a misnomer. The fundamentals of Judeo-Christian morality have to do with truth telling, justice, and concern for the unprivileged. Confessing, forgiving, and repenting are also fundamentals. Don’t be ashamed of them, Joe. Embrace them. My guess is that if you do, you will leave your debate partner shocked—if not speechless.

In the process, you will have succeeded in drawing a stark contrast between the “lies to nowhere” that she continues to tell on the one hand, and your (hopefully) terse, disarming honesty, on the other. You will be free to go ahead and demonstrate that in John McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin, no presidential candidate in the history of this country has made a more irresponsible selection for his running mate.

And best of all, you will be able to sit back and smile next Sunday as you listen to the second Scripture reading (from Philippians 4):

Whatever is true, honorable, and just…think about these and keep on doing them…Then the God who gives peace will be with you.

Let Nathaniel be your model: no duplicity.

Sincerely,

Ray McGovern

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4. THE US SIMPLY DOESN'T GET IT

(Biden and Palin hid like rabbits from the centre of the Middle East earthquake)

BY

ROBERT FISK


Palestinians ceased to exist in the United States on Thursday night. Both Joe Biden and Sarah Palin managed to avoid the use of that poisonous word. "Palestine" and "Palestinians" – that most cancerous, slippery, dangerous concept – simply did not exist in the vice-presidential debate. The phrase "Israeli occupation" was mercifully left unused. Neither the words "Jewish colony" nor "Jewish settlement" – not even that cowardly old get-out clause of American journalism, "Jewish neighbourhood" – got a look-in. Nope.

Those bold contenders of the US vice-presidency, so keen to prove their mettle when it comes to "defence", hid like rabbits from the epicentre of the Middle East earthquake: the existence of a Palestinian people. Sure, there was talk of a "two-state" solution, but it would have mystified anyone who didn't understand the region.

There was even a Biden jibe at George Bush for pressing on with "elections" – again, the adjective "Palestinian" went missing – that produced a Hamas victory. But Hamas appeared to exist in never-never land, a vast landscape that gradually encompassed all the vast and black deserts that stretch, in the imagination of US politicians, from the Mediterranean to Pakistan.

"Pakistan's (nuclear) missiles can already hit Israel," Biden thundered. But what was he talking about? Pakistan has not threatened Israel. It's supposed to be on our side. Both vice-presidential candidates seemed to think that our ally in the "war on terror" was now turning into an ally of the axis of evil. Even Islam didn't get a run for its money.

Indeed, one of the funniest reports of the week, yet another investigation of Obama's education, came from the Associated Press news agency. The would-be president, the Associated Press announced, had attended a Muslim school but hadn't "practised" Islam.

What on earth did this mean, I asked myself? Would AP have reported, for example, that McCain had attended a Christian school but hadn't "practised" Christianity? Then I got it. Obama had smoked Islam but he hadn't inhaled!

Travelling across the US this week – from Seattle to Houston to Washington and then to New York – I kept bumping into the results of America's White House-induced terror. A well-educated, upper-middle-class lady at a lunch turned to me and expressed her fear that Islam "wanted to take over America". When I suggested that this was pushing things a bit, she informed me that "the Muslims have already taken over France".

How does one reply to this? It's a bit like being informed by a perfectly sane and rational person that Martians have just landed in Tennessee. So I used the old Fisk trick when confronted by ravers of the "admit George Bush did 9/11" school. I looked at my watch, adopted a shocked expression and shouted: "Gotta go!"

But seriously. There was Biden on Thursday night, telling us that along Pakistan's border with Afghanistan – he was referring, of course, to the old frontier drawn by Sir Mortimer Durrand which most Pushtuns (and thus all Taliban) regard as fictional – "there have been 7,000 madrassas built ... and that's where bin Laden lives and we will go at him if we have actually (sic) intelligence".

Seven thousand? Where on earth does this figure come from? Yes, there are thousands of religious schools in Pakistan – but they're not all on the border. In another extraordinary bit of myth-making, Obama's man told us that "we kicked the Hizbollah out of Lebanon" – which is totally untrue.

And, of course, Israel – a word that must be uttered, repeatedly, by all US candidates – became the compass point of the entire Middle East, this "peace-seeking nation ... our strongest and best ally in the Middle East" (quoth Palin) of whom "no one in the United States Senate has been a better friend...than Joe Biden" (quoth Biden).

Israel was "in jeopardy" if America talked to Iran, Palin revealed. "We have got to assure them that we will never allow a second Holocaust." Thus was the corpse of Hitler dug up yet again – just as McCain resurrected the shadow of the Second World War last week when he blathered on about Eisenhower's sense of responsibility before D-Day. That Israel can quite adequately defend herself with 264 nuclear warheads went, of course, unmentioned, because acknowledging Israel's real power undermines the image of a small and vulnerable country relying on America for its defence.

Israelis deserve security. But where were the promises of security for Palestinians? Or the sympathy which Americans would immediately grant any other occupied people? Absent, needless to say. For we must gird ourselves for the next struggle against world evil in Pakistan.

Biden actually demanded a "stable" government in Islamabad, which was a little bit hypocritical only a few days after US troops had crossed its sovereign border to shoot up a Pakistani house allegedly used by the Taliban. As General David Petraeus told The New York Times this week, "The trends in Afghanistan have been in the wrong direction ... wresting control of certain areas from the Taliban will be very difficult."

It's an odd situation. Obama and Biden want to close down Iraq and re-conquer Afghanistan. The Palin College of Clichés characterised this as "a white flag of surrender in Iraq" while continuing to warn of the dangers of Iran, the name of whose loony president – Ahmadinejad – defeated McCain three times in last week's pseudo-debate.

But it's the same old story. All we have learned in America these past two weeks, to quote Joan Littlewood's Oh! What a Lovely War, is that the war goes on.

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