A review of The Commission by Philip Shenon. NY/Boston: Hachette Book Group/Twelve, 457 pp., $27.
"I don't want you to ever talk to me about al-Qaeda, about those threats. I don't want to hear about al-Qaeda anymore."
--John Ashcroft, July 12, 2001 (p. 247)
It's surprising that this book hasn't gotten more attention. Maybe everybody thinks they know the story. Maybe it's scandal fatigue.
And maybe I'm too innocent to live, but I hadn't heard that Ashcroft blew off an aide who wanted him to talk with George Tenet about al-Qaeda: "There's nothing I can do about that."
Why didn't the Ashcroft anecdote make it into the final 9/11 Report? The commission was bipartisan. It could not be too hard on either political party.
Philip Shenon, who covered the 9/11 hearings for The New York Times, treads some familiar ground in The Commission: The stonewalling over even having an investigation. The search for a bipartisan unity to make everything OK. Letting Bush, Cheney, and others testify without being sworn in. The campaign to discredit Richard Clarke. The list goes on.
Even so, the book is eye-opening and contains a lot of new information. Considering the restrictions on the 9/11 Commission, self-imposed and otherwise, it's amazing that the testimony and report led to anything substantive at all, let alone Condoleeza Rice's dentally extracted admission that Bush saw a memo entitled "Bin Laden determined to strike inside U.S."
This supposedly independent commission had intimate ties to the Bush regime. It was Karl Rove himself who asked former N.J. Gov. Tom Kean to lead the hearings. The partisan connection raised Kean's eyebrows, but he went ahead anyway, confident that he would be able to work in a constructive manner with the Bushies.
What could go wrong? Ashcroft launched vicious attacks on commission member Jamie Gorelick, accusing her of practically single-handedly destroying all lines of communications between intelligence agencies. It was enough to earn her death threats, accomplishing the mission of Ashcroft to deflect attention from his own neglect.
If the Rove connection was not enough, a co-author and close friend of Condoleeza Rice's, Philip Zelikow, was appointed executive director of the commission, in charge of day to day operations. Shenon gives many examples of Zelikow's actions to protect the administration, including blocking attempts to subpoena FAA and Pentagon officials. As the summer of 2004 dragged on:
[T]he [commission] staff felt beaten down by Zelikow .... 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. (p. 406)
Zelikow tried to use the commission to make the case for the Iraq war, by a now-familiar trick:
In a section about bin Laden's actions in the 1990s, Zelikow had inserted sentences that tried to link al-Qaeda to Iraq -- to suggest that the terrorist network had repeatedly communicated with the government of Saddam Hussein in the years before 9/11 and that bin Laden had seriously weighed moving to Iraq .... The passage was subtly crafted, with enough qualifiers to allow Zelikow to argue that he was not saying definitively that there was a working relationship between al-Qaeda and Iraq. But his point was clear, and he must have known what impact the passages would have when reporters and the White House got hold of them. (p. 321)
Zelikow was rewarded after the 2004 election with an appointment to State Department counselor, "a sort of all-purpose advisor who would have [Rice's] ear at all times....Zelikow told his new colleagues at the State Department that it was the sort of job he had always wanted." (p. 418)
Shenon's book also allows us to relive some of nonpartisanship's greatest hits. Self-styled above-the-frayers Kean, co-chair Bob Kerrey, and commissioner Lee Hamilton weren't bothered by Zelikow's conflicts of interest. After all, they were reliable Clinton-dissers. When Kean disappointed the Bushies by not defending them more loudly, they could always console themselves:
The White House found that its best support on the commission came from an unexpected corner -- from Lee Hamilton, the panel's top Democrat. Hamilton, they could see, was as much a man of the Washington establishment as he was a Democratic partisan. Probably more so. (p. 177)
Seekers of conspiracy theories will find little grist here. But it leaves little doubt that a truly independent, as opposed to a painfully "bipartisan," commission would have dug deeper and issued a report damning to the Bush regime.
What was left unsaid in the report, although the staff knew it perfectly well, was that the NSA archives almost certainly contained other vital information about al-Qaeda and its history. But there was no time left to search for it. Zelikow would later admit he too was worried that important classified information had never been reviewed at the NSA and elsewhere in the government before the 9/11 commission shut its doors, that critical evidence about bin Laden's terrorist network sat buried in government files, unread to this day. (p. 373)
P.S. to the above.
Glenn Greenwaldd, who apparently never sleeps, has the story about Attorney General Michael Mukasey's recent comments on 9/11. Mukasey said last week:
Officials "shouldn't need a warrant when somebody with a phone in Iraq picks up a phone and calls somebody in the United States because that's the call that we may really want to know about. And before 9/11, that's the call that we didn't know about. We knew that there has been a call from someplace that was known to be a safe house in Afghanistan and we knew that it came to the United States. We didn't know precisely where it went."
At that point in his answer, Mr. Mukasey grimaced, swallowed hard, and seemed to tear up as he reflected on the weaknesses in America's anti-terrorism strategy prior to the 2001 attacks. "We got three thousand. . . . We've got three thousand people who went to work that day and didn't come home to show for that," he said, struggling to maintain his composure.
"Michael Mukasey can cry all he wants about the 9/11 attacks," Greenwald says, but Mukasey is almost certainly lying. If the administration knew about this fatal call and did nothing about it, then it's certainly a greater case of negligence than anything Philip Shonen documents in The Commission.
Greenwald:
Even under the "old" FISA, no warrants are required where the targeted person is outside the U.S. (Afghanistan) and calls into the U.S. Thus, if it's really true, as Mukasey now claims, that the Bush administration knew about a Terrorist in an Afghan safe house making Terrorist-planning calls into the U.S., then they could have -- and should have -- eavesdropped on that call and didn't need a warrant to do so. So why didn't they? Mukasey's new claim that FISA's warrant requirements prevented discovery of the 9/11 attacks and caused the deaths of 3,000 Americans is disgusting and reckless, because it's all based on the lie that FISA required a warrant for targeting the "Afghan safe house." It just didn't. Nor does the House FISA bill require individual warrants when targeting a non-U.S. person outside the U.S.
Independently, even if there had been a warrant requirement for that call -- and there unquestionably was not -- why didn't the Bush administration obtain a FISA warrant to listen in on 9/11-planning calls from this "safe house"? Independently, why didn't the administration invoke FISA's 72-hour emergency warrantless window to listen in on those calls? If what Muskasey said this week is true -- and that's a big "if" -- his revelation about this Afghan call that the administration knew about but didn't intercept really amounts to one of the most potent indictments yet about the Bush administration's failure to detect the plot in action. Contrary to his false claims, FISA -- for multiple reasons -- did not prevent eavesdropping on that call.
Of course, Mukasey was trying to make a sobbing case for immunity for the telecom companies. If any of those cases went to trial, good God, classified information could get out.
Or not:
Mike Mukasey was a long-time federal judge and so I feel perfectly comfortable calling that what it is: a brazen lie. Federal courts hear classified information with great regularity and it is not heard in "open court." There are numerous options available to any federal judge to hear classified information -- closed courtrooms, in camera review (in chambers only), ex parte communications (communications between one party and the judge only). No federal judge -- and certainly not Vaughn Walker, the Bush 41 appointee presiding over the telecom cases -- is going to allow "disclosure in open court of . . . . the means and the methods by which we collect foreign intelligence." And Mukasey knows that.
Lying about surveillance, exploiting 9/11 for political hackery ... just another day in Bush's America.
Of course, McCain is a different kind of Republican, and we can rest easy that he'll put a stop to all this.