Philip Zelikow Had 9/11 Report Rewritten To Be More Favorable Of Condi


This is a new entry at historycommons.org. Condoleezza Rice didn't deserve "more favorable" treatment. She belongs in prison.

May-June 2004: Zelikow Has Portions of 9/11 Commission Report Rewritten to Be More Favorable to National Security Adviser Rice
9/11 Commission Executive Director Philip Zelikow tells the staff team working on the Bush administration’s response to terrorist threats in the summer of 2001 that their drafts must be rewritten to cast National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice in a better light. Rice’s testimony about the administration’s prioritizing of terrorism has been contradicted by former counterterrorism “tsar” Richard Clarke, who said that al-Qaeda was not a high priority for the White House. The commission staffers think that Clarke is telling the truth, because, in the words of author Philip Shenon, Clarke had left a “vast documentary record” about the White House’s inattention to terrorism. Clarke’s account is also corroborated by other National Security Council (NSC) members, the CIA, and the State Department.


  • Zelikow's Reaction - However, Zelikow, a close associate of Rice (see 1995 and January 3, 2001), tells the staffers their version is “too Clarke-centric” and demands “balance.” Shenon will comment: “He never said so explicitly, but Zelikow made clear to [the staffers] that the commission’s final report should balance out every statement of Clarke’s with a statement from Rice. The team should leave out any judgment on which of them was telling the truth.”
  • Support from Commission Lawyer - Zelikow is supported to a point in this dispute by Daniel Marcus, the commission’s lawyer. Marcus thinks that the staffers are making Clarke into a “superhero,” and that there were some “limitations and flaws” in his performance. Marcus also sees that the staff’s suspicions of Zelikow and his ties to Rice are no longer hidden, but will later say: “In a sense they overreacted to Philip because they were so worried about him they pushed and pushed and pushed, and sometimes they were wrong.”
  • Staffer Regrets Not Resigning Earlier - One of the key staffers involved in the dispute, Warren Bass, had previously considered resigning from the commission due to what he perceived as Zelikow’s favoring of Rice. At this point he regrets not resigning earlier, but does not do so now. Bass and his colleagues merely console themselves with the hope that the public will read between the lines and work out that Clarke is telling the truth and Rice is not.
  • "Tortured Passages" - Shenon will comment: “[T]he results of the team’s work were some of the most tortured passages in the final report, especially in the description of the performance of the NSA in the first months of the Bush presidency. It was written almost as a point, counterpoint—Clarke says this, Rice says the opposite—with no conclusion about what the truth finally was.” [Shenon, 2008, pp. 394-396]

You'd be surprised...

At the amount of people that haven't seen this clip. I got it a long time ago from Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 DVD. It was one of the extras.

The August 6th, PDB was one of the first things that REALLY made me take a hard look at 9/11. We were told again and again that there were "no warnings," and that no one had "any idea" that something like 9/11 could happen, and then news of a document entitled, "Bin Laden Determined To Strike In U.S." came out. The title is a warning in and of itself. It talked about how the FBI was "conducting approximately 70 full-field investigations throughout the U.S. that it considers bin Laden-related," and that they saw "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."

Once I found out that we were lied to, I was "off to the races."

You may remember that Bush said he requested the PDB because of threats in Genoa. Threats reminiscent of what happened on 9/11.

You may also remember that Bush has said, "I don’t think anyone in this government [in] the prior government, that could envision flying airplanes into buildings on such a massive scale." He also said, “had we had any inkling whatsoever that terrorists were about to attack our country, we would have moved heaven and earth to protect America."

So let's see, he requested a PDB because of threats from the air, was given the PDB that said there were "Al-Qaeda" inside the United States that might be preparing for hijackings or other types of attacks, and still had the audacity to say the types of things mentioned above. Not only that, but he didn't "move heaven and earth." He didn't even have the decency to GET THE HELL OUT OF THE CLASSROOM.

It has been 7+ years since 9/11. Would you believe the August 6th, PDB was NOT the only warning this administration received?

People think that the warnings are considered "limited hangout", or "LIHOP," but the fact of the matter is, the warnings they received might have come from honest people in the intelligence industry (ours, and around the world) that stumbled across something initiated by elements within our Government. Patty Casazza alleged that whistleblowers claimed they knew the day, the target, and the type of attack. If this is true, imagine the kinds of things they could do to insure the success of the attacks with that kind of information.

Another important aspect of the warnings shows that they LIED. If they lied about that, imagine what else they lied about.


Do these people deserve to know how and why their loved ones were murdered? Do we deserve to know how and why 9/11 happened?

UVA

And what will be the consequences for Zelikow and the other 100 or so known main offenders? It would appear nothing.

We're...

Working on that...


Do these people deserve to know how and why their loved ones were murdered? Do we deserve to know how and why 9/11 happened?

Suspect Zelikow

Zelikow certainly one of the top twenty suspects. He was perhaps the first PNAC/Neocon to use the "New Pearl Harbor" phrase back in the 90's.

Shenon's book.

Looks like there is a a lot of damaging info from Shenon's book.
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A 9/11/2008 Resolution: Start Your Own 9/11 Blog

Typo alert

Should be NSC not NSA in the penultimate section.

Here's one of the tortured passages. First the description of a memo by Clarke:

"The Principals Committee had its first meeting on al Qaeda on September 4. On the day of the meeting, Clarke sent Rice an impassioned personal note. He criticized U.S. counterterrorism efforts past and present. The "real question" before the principals, he wrote, was "are we serious about dealing with the al Qida threat? . . . Is al Qida a big deal? . . . Decision makers should imagine themselves on a future day when the CSG has not succeeded in stopping al Qida attacks and hundreds of Americans lay dead in several countries, including the US," Clarke wrote. "What would those decision makers wish that they had done earlier? That future day could happen at any time." 247

"Clarke then turned to the Cole."The fact that the USS Cole was attacked during the last Administration does not absolve us of responding for the attack," he wrote. "Many in al Qida and the Taliban may have drawn the wrong lesson from the Cole: that they can kill Americans without there being a US response, without there being a price. . . . One might have thought that with a $250m hole in a destroyer and 17 dead sailors, the Pentagon might have wanted to respond. Instead, they have often talked about the fact that there is `nothing worth hitting in Afghanistan' and said `the cruise missiles cost more than the jungle gyms and mud huts' at terrorist camps." Clarke could not understand "why we continue to allow the existence of large scale al Qida bases where we know people are being trained to kill Americans." 248

"Turning to the CIA, Clarke warned that its bureaucracy, which was "masterful at passive aggressive behavior," would resist funding the new national security presidential directive, leaving it a "hollow shell of words without deeds."The CIA would insist its other priorities were more important. Invoking President Bush's own language, Clarke wrote,"You are left with a modest effort to swat flies, to try to prevent specific al Qida attacks by using [intelligence] to detect them and friendly governments' police and intelligence officers to stop them. You are left waiting for the big attack, with lots of casualties, after which some
major US retaliation will be in order[.]" 249"

And here's the balance, which comes right after it (p. 212-213):

"Rice told us she took Clarke's memo as a warning not to get dragged down by bureaucratic inertia. 250 While his arguments have force, we also take Clarke's jeremiad as something more. After nine years on the NSC staff and more than three years as the president's national coordinator, he had often failed to persuade these agencies to adopt his views, or to persuade his superiors to set an agenda of the sort he wanted or that the whole government could support."

Now, when you read that as a part of a 500+ page report, you might not fully realize what was going on here, but when you look at it in isolation, your reaction may be a little different. A "warning not to get dragged down by bureaucratic inertia"??!! And note the use of the casually disparaging word "jeremiad," which I had to look up. It's an absolutely stunning memo, but the commission just dismisses it. It wasn't the staff led by Bass and Hurley that did this, it was Zelikow.

Lying

is the MotherTongue of the Necons and Neo-Liberals.

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The CONSTITUTION is NOT going to "collapse" into pulverized dust no matter how much thermate/explosives or planes they throw at it