Revealed: Ashcroft, Tenet, Rumsfeld warned 9/11 Commission about ‘line’ it ’should not cross’
Revealed: Ashcroft, Tenet, Rumsfeld warned 9/11 Commission about ‘line’ it ’should not cross’
By Sahil Kapur
Wednesday, March 17th, 2010 -- 9:11 am
Senior Bush administration officials sternly cautioned the 9/11 Commission against probing too deeply into the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, according to a document recently obtained by the ACLU.
The notification came in a letter dated January 6, 2004, addressed by Attorney General John Ashcroft, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and CIA Director George J. Tenet. The ACLU described it as a fax sent by David Addington, then-counsel to former vice president Dick Cheney.
In the message, the officials denied the bipartisan commission's request to question terrorist detainees, informing its two senior-most members that doing so would "cross" a "line" and obstruct the administration's ability to protect the nation.
"In response to the Commission's expansive requests for access to secrets, the executive branch has provided such access in full cooperation," the letter read. "There is, however, a line that the Commission should not cross -- the line separating the Commission's proper inquiry into the September 11, 2001 attacks from interference with the Government's ability to safeguard the national security, including protection of Americans from future terrorist attacks."
The 9/11 Commission, officially called the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, was formed by President Bush in November of 2002 "to prepare a full and complete account of the circumstances surrounding the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks" and to offer recommendations for preventing future attacks.
"The Commission staff's proposed participation in questioning of detainees would cross that line," the letter continued. "As the officers of the United States responsible for the law enforcement, defense and intelligence functions of the Government, we urge your Commission not to further pursue the proposed request to participate in the questioning of detainees."
FireDogLake's Marcy Wheeler speculates that this was an attempt by the Bush administration to ensure that its torture of certain detainees, which has since been widely documented, remained secret.
"[W]hoever made these annotations appears to have been most worried that Commission staff members could make independent judgments about the detainees and the interrogations," Wheeler wrote on her blog. The official "didn't want anyone to independently evaluate the interrogations conducted in the torture program."
Eventually, the commission's co-chairs harshly criticized the administration for having purportedly "destroyed" tapes of its interrogations with terror suspects, as Raw Story reported last year.
9/11 Commission members Thomas Kean and Lee H. Hamilton wrote that although US President George W. Bush had ordered all executive branch agencies to cooperate with the probe, "recent revelations that the CIA destroyed videotaped interrogations of Qaeda operatives leads us to conclude that the agency failed to respond to our lawful requests for information about the 9/11 plot."
"Those who knew about those videotapes — and did not tell us about them — obstructed our investigation."
They continued: “There could have been absolutely no doubt in the mind of anyone at the CIA — or the White House — of the commission’s interest in any and all information related to Qaeda detainees involved in the 9/11 plot.
"Yet no one in the administration ever told the commission of the existence of videotapes of detainee interrogations," Kean and Hamilton wrote.
The letter can be found on page 26 of the ACLU's set of unveiled documents.
Full Story: http://rawstory.com/2010/03/revealed-ashcroft-tenet-rumsfeld-warned-911-commission-line-should-cross/
- Orangutan.'s blog
- Login to post comments
Some say we have no evidence? OMG
For God's sake, why don't the perps just scream "I'm the one that did it", for the obvious. and multiple cases of odd behavior, and more than apparent squirming maneuvers? What does it take for so many to see the ever growing elephant that fills the room?
Nice find
More evidence of a Commission being man-handled by PNAC thugs.
Plot by evil circus clowns
From Dubya sitting there with the goat book with Card whispering in his ear...
...to Cheney at the White House screaming confirmation at the Air Force kid "The orders stand "in front ofSec. Norm Mineta...
...to CNN capturing Air Force Looking glass airborne command post over DC before...
...to all the NORAD fuck-ups after the whole world watched the Air Force tail Payne Stewart's last flight all over US airspace...
...to clearly way-over-engineered detonation made the 80-90% of the bulk of the Twin Towers disintegrate into ash in mid air, and left craters at ground zero with temperatures above 2,000 degrees 3 week after the attack.
One monstrous fuck up followed by another heinous clusterf*ck after another.
Take down the Tent
.
By putting up a tent for 9/11 truth, at the Washington Mall.
Might as well get right in their FACE about it. What the heck, we've got nothing to lose, it's all gone down the drain anyway right? Whoever can do it, might as well get there to DC and throw our bodies on the machine while shouting truth to power. Sounds like fun!
ACLU data
Again, I want to vomit. I also just read the 800 lbs. gorilla info detailing the Israel Zionist Terror Mafia bascially running the US.
I'm sitting here at my keyboard basically wordless. Im all for pacifism and at some point the Truth Movement is going to need to make some critical advances.
Do we all just need to pony up a few hundred dollars per person and hire a couple bad ass attorneys willing to bring the heat?
I'm able to donate $500 by end of May'ish.
Leftwright, please, what to do? Is there a formulated plan?
A legal fund is a very good idea,
but we have to make a bit more progress in the court of public opinion first, imo.
We will then have the necessary leverage to make sure our hard earned and precious dollars are not wasted on attorneys when judges can dodge legitimate legal inquires with impunity.
I've concluded that key elected officials in the US government are either bribed by the Saudis or blackmailed by AIPAC and the Mossad, or both. Other elected officials and key appointed officials are willingly complicit in their acts of treason against the American people and the constitution they swore an oath to uphold.
At its core, 9/11 truth has always been about exposing and rooting out the massive corruption that has brought the United States to the brink of destruction.
It is way past time that the 9/11 truth movement organized itself around a common mission and agreed on a set of strategies to accomplish that mission.
The truth shall set us free. Love is the only way forward.
Ted Olsen as 9/11 Truth Advocate
Hey LW, now that Ted Olsen is representing gay marital rights before the Supreme Court, maybe he'd take this on (just kidding) for good measure.
Mission Possible
LW: "It is way past time that the 9/11 truth movement organized itself around a common mission and agreed on a set of strategies to accomplish that mission."
That mission is worth a full and detailed discussion.
For instance (Mass DVD distribution)
People at 911Blogger have reported continued success distributing DVDs. If a very large number of people could be organized to do this, it could transform public opinion and understanding.
More evidence is going to come to light, and some of the evidence already in the light will be drawn together in more effective ways, and thus the DVDs will keep improving.
(PS I know this idea has been suggested before. It has become highly tenable now due to the efforts of those who have been distributing DVDs up to this point. Many thanks for that.)
The N Texas Group has distributed 40,000 DVDs
The N Texas Group has distributed 40,000 DVDs.
This should be an ongoing activity for all of us.
Habeeb,
I admire your honesty.
I've often felt like throwing up, myself.
Going down the rabbit hole is not for the meek. You don't know how far down it goes and your don't know what you're going to find as you do.
Much of it is almost heart-stopping to me.
That's one of the reasons that some people can't even start the journey.
Yesterday, a guy reminded me that some people just throw themselves into cold water while others ease in one toe at a time. He said that he was a one-toe-at-a-time guy.
Generally, so am I but not about this.
There are days, though, when I have to stop. I can't stand it any more. But, it's always a brief respite because there's just too much work to be done.
Crossed lines
Speaking of suppressing info, the House Jud Comm is trying to pass a bill denying any access to info due to persistent requests of said information.
The continual emails to a Hawaian hospital requesting verification of Obamas birth have prompted the pending govt action.
Misprision of Treason - evidence and action
I hope everyone who is outraged on the proof of 9/11 distortion and cover-up, to file a Misprision of treason signed document to your local Court. Give this evidence to those who have taken sworn oaths to protect the US Constitution. Through this method they have to accept your filing a crime. Following that we can then assert pressure on those who have received the evidence to respond appropriately.
= = = = = = = = = = = =
Evidence of Treason
The National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) reported that World Trade Center 7 collapsed due to fire damage. If that is the case, it would be the first steel-framed skyscraper in history to undergo total collapse from fire alone. The fact that NIST refused to even consider explosive demolition when it is the most likely hypothesis and fits all of the available evidence is, in and of itself, grounds for suspicion of a cover-up. Fire doesn’t pulverize 90,000 tons of concrete to powder. Explosives do. Crucial evidence from the World Trade Center crime scene, including most of the steel from WTC 1, 2 and 7, was deliberately shipped away and destroyed before it could be properly examined.
The Twin Towers collapsed too rapidly and with too much violence for the NIST explanation to be even remotely valid;; the temperatures attained during the destruction were much too high; the acceleration of the buildings during their collapses was much too smooth. Well over one hundred first responders witnessed explosions at the on-set of the collapses. Small chips of nano-thermitic composite materials – a highly sophisticated explosive, has been found and documented by an international team of scientists in large quantities in the dust of the debris at the World Trade Center.
This work is published in Open Chemistry/Physics Journal, "Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe." One of its authors, Niels H. Harrit in a German interview in May 2009, said: "There are no experts on nano-thermite without connections to the military…. This stuff has only been prepared under military contracts in the USA and probably in bigger allied countries. This is secret military research…It was not prepared in a cave in Afghanistan."
Senior Counsel for the 9/11 Commission, John Farmer, disclosed in his book, The Ground Truth “...at some level of the government, at some point in time…there was an agreement not to tell the truth about what happened... I was shocked at how different the truth was from the way it was described …. The [Norad air defense] tapes told a radically different story from what had been told to us and the public for two years. This is not spin.” Whenever contact is lost with any airplane, fighter jets routinely take to the air to investigate. This commonly occurs about 100 times per year in well under 20 minutes. But on 9/11 nearly two hours passed without any interception.
There were also warnings of the impending attacks from other countries; plus insiders such as John Ashcroft, top military officers, and San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown were warned not to fly. Additional evidence of foreknowledge came from insider trading. Shortly before 9/11, tens of millions that were made by Put options on American Airlines show 99% probability of illegal insider trading.
Evidence meant to implicate 19 Arabs as hijackers of four planes (passports, business cards, and so on) alleged to have survived the fiery plane impacts is not credible and suggests a staged crime scene. Furthermore, since seven alleged hijackers were housed on US military bases, two lived with an undercover FBI agent, and many others, like alleged flight 93 pilot Ziad Samir Jarrah, were brought over to flight school in Florida by CIA agents, we must conclude that the training was part of a cover story concocted by US intelligence, and that most of these 9/11 alleged hijackers were NOT involved, or were unwitting patsies, to say nothing of the nine who showed up still alive AFTER 9/11. Hundreds of contradictions exist that were omitted in the official version.
I, _ _the undersigned citizen of the United States, affirm the duty and right of all citizens of these United States of America to take action in accordance with US Code 18, Section 2382 on Misprision of treason, and affirm that I have or will soon discharge my duty and right under its provisions, and affirm that the officials so informed are required to act in a manner honoring their sworn oaths to uphold and protect the Constitution of the United States.
Signed on this date ________ by ________________
References:
18 USC Sec. 2382. Misprision of treason - http://uscode.house.gov/download/pls/18C115.txt
”Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe”
Open Chemistry/Physics Journal
www.bentham-open.org/pages/content.php?TOCPJ/2009/00000002/00000001/7TOC...
“Did nano-thermite take down the WTC?”
Interview with Dr. Niels Harrit; Published by RT, 21 January 2010
http://rt.com/Politics/2009-07-09/Did_nano-thermite_take_down_the_WTC.ht...
The Mysterious Collapse of World Trade Center 7, Why the Final Official Report about 9/11 is Unscientific and False
By David Ray Griffin
www.interlinkbooks.com/product_info.php?cPath=4_19&products_id=2130
"9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions, The A Critique of the Kean-Zelikow Report"
David Ray Griffin -
www.interlinkbooks.com/product_info.php?products_id=983
118 Firefighters' Testimony to Explosions in the Twin Towers
www.journalof911studies.com/articles/Article_5_118Witnesses_WorldTradeCe...
Kolar, Jay, "What We Now Know about the Alleged 9-11 Hijackers", in The Hidden History of 9-11,
2nd edition, P. Zarembka, editor, New York: Seven Stories Press, 2008, pp. 3-44 and 293-304.
Poteshman, Allen M., "Unusual Option Market Activity and the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001",
Journal of Business, Vol. 79, no. 4, 2006, pp. 1703-1726.
The non-interviews with KSM
Thanks for providing a direct link to those documents. Prof. Griffin cited some of them in Debunking 9/11 Debunking. The 9/11 Commission’s request to interview KSM was denied on the grounds that it would endanger our national security by interrupting current interrogations.
So (as revealed in the documents above) the Commission suggested a compromise in which they would pass questions to the interrogator and observe the interrogation through one-way glass. At least they could make some kind of assessment based on body language or whatever. “Request Denied,” as Kommandant Klink would say.
The Commission then accepted a pathetic alternate, alternate compromise: They would submit written questions to a CIA-appointed “project manager” who would then hand the questions off to the interrogators. Griffin quotes Kean & Hamilton in their book Without Precedent wherein they acknowledge that this meant “receiving information third-hand—passed from the detainee, to the interrogator, to the person who writes up the interrogation report, and finally to our staff in the form of reports, not even transcripts.”
Actually, it sounds more like fifth-hand information—and as we all know, only “conspiracy theorists” rely on such flimy sources of info. Yet as Griffin points out, the vast majority of information in the 9/11CR concerning al-qaeda’s alleged role in 9/11 is based on these “interviews” with KSM.
No wonder certain elements in the government don’t want this man tried in an actual court of law!
The untouchable criminal class!
They can publish the need for the event (crime), capitalize on the event (crime) and close off investigation of the event (crime). It makes the mafia look like amatuers. It's like when God tries to take the devil to court for installing AC in Hell in violation of the rules, and devil smiles and says yeah well where are you going to find an attorney up there?
Russ Baker Today on RT
critical breaking news..
Russia Today is doing some excellent interviews on9/11 truth.
Flyby News is linking to this blog under critical breaking news.
thanks for posting..
Left Wright...right on!!!
LW, again, you have inspired me.
I fully agree, its best to know each and every success and pitfall prior to a relentless legal attack. You and your team would know best when that time has arrived. As proffered, I will be coming into some extra dough in a couple months.