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9/11 Commission

Stories related to the government commission tasked with resolving the questions surrounding the events of September 11, 2001.

I Have A Question About The NSA And 9/11


"You can do an investigation, and if you don't really want to research an area, you just don't look at it. If you don't ask them all of the questions, or you don't let them tell you the whole story, ya know... then you can write a report based on half-truths." - 9/11 Family Member, September Eleventh Advocate, "Jersey Girl" Mindy Kleinberg

Source: www.cindysheehanssoapbox.com

Jon Gold
5/1/2013
Updated: 5/5/2013

Hopefully, you remember the time right after 9/11. A time when we were told repeatedly that there were absolutely no warnings, and that no one had any idea something like that could happen. If not, feel free to browse the "9/11 Denials" section available at www.historycommons.org.

9/11 Commission Deceived: An Unintentional Work of Fiction Based on Cheney’s Torture Program

The 9/11 Commission: A Victim of Cheney’s Torture Program

Preface:  This is not a partisan post. We have repeatedly documented that Obama is as bad or worse than the Bush administration.

In the run up to the Iraq war – and for several years thereafter – the program of torture carried out by the Bush administration was specifically specifically aimed at establishing a false justification for war. Dick Cheney is the guy who pushed for torture, pressured the Justice Department lawyers to write memos saying torture was legal, and made the pitch to Congress justifying torture. (The former director of the CIA said Cheney oversaw American torture policies).

The type of torture used by the U.S. on the Guantanamo suspects is of a special type. Senator Levin revealed that the the U.S. used Communist torture techniques specifically aimed at creating false confessions (see this, this, this and this).

According to NBC News:

  • Much of the 9/11 Commission Report was based upon the testimony of people who were tortured
  • At least four of the people whose interrogation figured in the 9/11 Commission Report have claimed that they told interrogators information as a way to stop being “tortured.”
  • One of the Commission’s main sources of information was tortured until he agreed to sign a confession that he was not even allowed to read
  • The 9/11 Commission itself doubted the accuracy of the torture confessions, and yet kept their doubts to themselves

In fact, the 9/11 Commission Report was largely based on third-hand accounts of what tortured detainees said, with two of the three parties in the communication being government employees.

Jon Gold's C-SPAN Collection

For the last year or so, one of my "pet projects" has been to search the video archives of C-SPAN for statements made about different people, different events, and make short movies out of them. They cover a multitude of topics, including NORAD's response, Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, the Israeli Art Students, Saudi Arabia, and many others. Here is my C-SPAN Movie Collection, in the order they were created.

Praise For The 9/11 Report



Kristen Breitweiser's Testimony Before The Joint Congressional Inquiry Into 9/11 - 9/18/2002



People Need To Be Held Accountable For 9/11



Opening Statement Of Eleanor Hill At The Joint Congressional Inquiry Into 9/11 - 9/18/2002

Janette Mackinlay speaks at UC Davis, May 1, 2009

Janette Mackinlay, 1948 - 2010 was an artist, 9/11 survivor and activist for 9/11 Truth and justice.  This video (in 2 parts) shows Janette's presentation at the University of California Davis on May 1, 2009. 

The occasion was Prof. Steven E. Jones' first public presentation of his research on dust from the World Trade Center.  Janette was the first person to give Prof. Jones a sample of dust from the World Trade Center.  Prof. Jones, Prof. Niels Harrit and other scientists found red gray chips in the dust, some visible to the naked eye.  Scientific examination revealed that these were unexploded pieces of nanothermite, a military grade explosive researched and developed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories in Livermore, California. 

High-Level Officials Eager to Spill the Beans About What REALLY Happened… But No One In Washington or the Media Wants to Hear

9/11 Commission Admits It Never Got The Facts … But No One Wants to Hear From the People Who Know What Happened

9/11 Commission: We Never Got All of the Facts

9/11 Commissioners admit that they never got to the bottom of 9/11. For example:

Indeed, 9/11 Commissioners and other officials say that the true facts were hidden from them, or covered up (you don’t have to get bogged down in reading this section – you can skip ahead to the next, if you like; this is just documenting that the 9/11 Commission report is in no way the last word on 9/11):

National Archive keeps bulk of 9/11 Commission report sealed

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/09/08/national-archive-keeps-bulk-of-911...

By Reuters
Thursday, September 8th, 2011

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Ten years after al Qaeda's attack on the United States, the vast majority of the 9/11 Commission's investigative records remain sealed at the National Archives in Washington, even though the commission had directed the archives to make most of the material public in 2009, Reuters has learned.

The National Archives' failure to release the material presents a hurdle for historians and others seeking to plumb one of the most dramatic events in modern American history.

The 575 cubic feet of records were in large part the basis for the commission's public report, issued July 22, 2004. The commission, formally known as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, was established by Congress in late 2002 to investigate the events leading up to the 9/11 attacks, the pre-attack effectiveness of intelligence agencies and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the government's emergency response.

New video on obstruction of 9/11 investigation

Today I released the short film "Inside 9/11 - Obstructing the investigation":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQXwVs7fV1c

It argues that former 9/11 commisson director Philip Zelikow fired a staff member for investigating highly sensitive evidence of a secret support network for the alleged hijackers in the United States. The recently published interview of former "anti-terror czar" Richard Clarke supports some of the claims made in the film.

To many 9/11 researchers this might not be new, since the issue is already mentioned in Philip Shenon´s book "The Commission", published in 2008. But I thought it might be the right time to remember ...

Yet Another Designed to Fail Commission!

From Washington's Blog: http://georgewashington2.blogspot.com/

We've heard this before, haven't we and is it any surprise? This time more people are beginning to catch on, especially the one's who've lost their homes....

From the very outset, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission was set up to fail.

***

The investigations were further hampered by the requirement that subpoenas have bi-partisan approval along with Its decision to hold hearings with high profile individuals, including top Wall Street executives, before much in the way of lower-level investigation had been completed. The usual way to get meaningful disclosure from a top executive is to confront him with hard-to-defend material or actions; interrogations under bright lights, while a fun bit of theater, generally yield little in the absence of adequate prep.

***

Sibel Edmonds: The "Exceptionally" Redacted 9/11 Commission Interview

thanks to Jon Gold for the tip...

http://www.boilingfrogspost.com/2011/01/06/the-%E2%80%9Cexceptionally-%E...

By Sibel Edmonds
Thursday, 6. January 2011

Newly Released 9/11 Commission Files at Cryptome.Org

Exclusive: Key FBI whistleblower: Had WikiLeaks existed, 9/11, Iraq war ‘could have been prevented’

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/12/exclusive-wikileaks-benefits-public-i...

By Nathan Diebenow
Thursday, December 9th, 2010

A Time Magazine 'Person of the Year' argues WikiLeaks serves the public good

A member of a group of former intelligence professionals that has rallied behind WikiLeaks suggested in a recent interview with Raw Story that the world would be a different and better place had the online secrets outlet come into existence years sooner.

“If there had been a mechanism like Wikileaks, 9/11 could have been prevented,” Coleen Rowley, a former special agent/legal counsel at the FBI's Minneapolis division, told Raw Story in an exclusive interview.

Explore 9/11 with Gov. Kean at Stockton College

Explore 9/11 with Gov. Kean at Stockton event Sept. 14
Written by STAFF REPORTS
Wednesday, 01 September 2010 11:06
View Comments
GALLOWAY TOWNSHIP – The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey will present a unique perspective on the events of Sept. 11, 2001 6 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 14 in the Elizabeth B. Alton Auditorium.
The free event will feature former Gov. Thomas H. Kean, who co-chaired the federal government’s 9/11 Commission, interviewing John Farmer Jr., senior counsel to the commission and author of “The Ground Truth: The Untold Story of America Under Attack on 9/11.”
“This is a unique opportunity to hear Gov. Kean interview a key figure of the commission he co-chaired,” said Sharon Schulman, executive director of the college’s William J. Hughes Center for Public Policy. “As we approach the milestone first decade since the attacks, we have a better understanding of events leading up to that day and the implications post-9/11. Our event serves to engage and enlighten as our nation moves forward. Our students and community will be hearing true insiders’ perspectives on the events of 9/11.”

Josh Marshall of TPM Says His Readers Recommend Looming Tower and 9/11 Commission Report!!!

August 20, Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo posted a blog asking readers to recommend "a good factually-grounded narrative history of the [9/11] attacks, their background, execution and probably something on the aftermath as well." As TPM has done some decent muckraking and investigative reporting, has a progressive slant and has attracted a following of basically intelligent people concerned about political corruption and abuse of power, I was surprised to see that, according to Marshall, the majority of his readers recommended the limited hangouts/mis-disinfo The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright and the 9/11 Commission Report- but that's what he said. - loose nuke

Grayson slams mosque ‘distraction’: Talk about admin that ‘let’ 9/11 happen instead

http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0821/grayson-slams-mosque-debate-talk-bush-l...

By Stephen C. Webster
Saturday, August 21st, 2010

The debate over a planned Islamic community center several blocks from New York City's World Trade Center site is a "distraction," according to Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL).

Instead, the debate should shift in focus to an examination of the administration which "let it happen."

'It,' of course, being the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The remark was made during a Friday appearance on MSNBC's The Ed Show with former liberal talk radio host Ed Schultz.

“If we are going to talk about 9/11, why don’t we talk about how not so much the people who died on 9/11 were disgraced by the possibility of an Islamic athletic center several blocks away; how about the fact that they were disgraced by a president who let it happen?" he asked. "Who went on vacation for the entire month of August after he was warned in writing that Osama bin Laden was actually finding targets in NYC and learning how to take these planes and do terrible things with them? The thing itself said ‘hijacking’ and they did nothing about it."

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is 'annoyed' by 9/11 truth

"Wanted by the CIA: Wikileaks founder Julian Assange"
Belfast Telegraph, July 19, 2010

In this interview, Belfast Telegraph reporter Matthew Bell asks Wikileaks founder Julian Assange about "conspiracy theories". Assange subsequently explains his position.

His obsession with secrecy, both in others and maintaining his own, lends him the air of a conspiracy theorist. Is he one? "I believe in facts about conspiracies," he says, choosing his words slowly. "Any time people with power plan in secret, they are conducting a conspiracy. So there are conspiracies everywhere. There are also crazed conspiracy theories. It's important not to confuse these two. Generally, when there's enough facts about a conspiracy we simply call this news." What about 9/11? "I'm constantly annoyed that people are distracted by false conspiracies such as 9/11, when all around we provide evidence of real conspiracies, for war or mass financial fraud." What about the Bilderberg conference? "That is vaguely conspiratorial, in a networking sense. We have published their meeting notes."

Some Things the 9/11 Commission Didn't Want to Know About

In case you missed it, here's a great quote from this week:

J. Cofer Black, the State Department's Coordinator for Counterterrorism, who was the former point man for the U.S. government's international counterterrorism policy in the first term of the Bush administration, says that "there were things the [9/11] commission wanted to know about and things they didn't want to know about."

Did the 9/11 Commission make a deal to keep some facts secret for 5 years?

For a reminder of the 911 Commission's mandate, click here. And yet they have agreements to keep things confidential for 5 years? Thanks to Ron for sending this in...

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=364x2294509#2294550

Not many people noticed this during Mr. Ben Veniste's interview in the wake of the Clinton-Fox News Sunday interview:
"BLITZER: Now, I read this report, the 9/11 Commission report. This is a big, thick book. I don't see anything and I don't remember seeing anything about this exchange that you had with the president in this report.

BEN-VENISTE: Well, I had hoped that we had -- we would have made both the Clinton interview and the Bush interview a part of our report, but that was not to be. I was outvoted on that question.

BLITZER: Why?

BEN-VENISTE: I didn't have the votes.

BLITZER: Well, was -- were the Republican members trying to protect the president and the vice president? Is that what your suspicion is?

BEN-VENISTE: I think the question was that there was a degree of confidentiality associated with that and that we would take from that the output that is reflected in the report, but go no further. And that until some five years' time after our work, we would keep that confidential. I thought we would be better to make all of the information that we had available to the public and make our report as transparent as possible so that the American public could have that."

9/11 Commission WAS Informed of Tenet Briefing

The 9/11 Commissioners have reacted to Bob Woodward's disclosure that CIA director George Tenet briefed Condie Rice about the imminent attack by saying "no one told us!"

Uh, turns out someone did, but they didn't mention it in the 9/11 Commission Report. As McClatchy Newspapers puts it:

"The independent Sept. 11, 2001, commission was given the same “scary” briefing about an imminent al Qaida attack on a U.S. target that was presented to the White House two months before the attacks, but failed to disclose the warning in its 428-page report.

Former CIA Director George Tenet presented the briefing to commission member Richard Ben Veniste and executive director Philip Zelikow in secret testimony at CIA headquarters on Jan. 28, 2004, said three former senior agency officials.

Tenet raised the matter himself, displayed slides from a Power Point presentation that he and other officials had given to then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice on July 10, 2001, and offered to testify on the matter in public if the commission asked him to, they said.

In the briefing, Tenet warned "in very strong terms" that intelligence from a variety of sources indicated that Osama bin Laden's terrorist organization was planning an attack on a U.S. target in the near future, but didn't provide specifics about the exact timing or nature of a possible attack, or about whether it would take place in the United States or overseas, said the former senior intelligence officials, all of whom requested anonymity because Tenet’s presentation was classified.

Kean & Hamilton Explain U.S. Military Failure to Intercept Flight 77

(This ironic look at Kean and Hamilton's tag-team book; "Without Precedent" is posted over at DemocraticUnderground.com. Maybe they should have called the book, "Without President".)

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&add...

“Without Precedent – The Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission”, written by the two co-chairmen of the 9/11 Commission, Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton, is in their words “the compelling inside story of how the … 9/11 Commission managed to succeed against all odds in producing a report that made clear what went wrong and why.”

In this post I describe the authors’ attempts to justify just one of their major findings – a finding that to many people, including me, is the most incredible of the whole incredible story of 9/11. That is the explanation of how the most expensive, powerful, and technologically advanced military that the world has ever known failed to prevent an attack on its capital city despite what appeared to be plenty of time to prevent it. For clarity, my editorial comments in response to various statements by the authors are in red.

Continued...

9/11 Live or Fabricated: Do the NORAD Tapes Verify The 9/11 Commission Report?

Dr. Griffin's radio interview concerning this article was posted in August. Here are links to the actual article.

Part 1 of Dr. Griffin's article is here, and Part 2 is here.

This article is too long to post here, but well worth the read. Check it out and then post your comments.

Thanks to 911Truth.org for hosting the article.

Spot the difference - awareness of United 175

There is a difference between the 9/11 Commission's account of awareness of United 175's hijacking and the version used in the recent CBC documentary Secret History of 9/11.

The 9/11 Commission gives the following account of a conversion between New York ATC Centre and the FAA Command Centre in Herndon:
"NEW YORK COMMAND CENTRE: We have several situations going on here. It's escalating big, big time. We need to get the military involved with us...
We're, we're involved with something else; we have other aircraft that may have a similar situation going on here." (p. 22, 9/11 CR)

However, CBC lays it out a little differently:
"NEW YORK COMMAND CENTRE: We have several situations going on here. It's escalating big, big time. We need to get the military involved with us."
"NATIONAL COMMAND CENTER: We're, we're involved with something else; we have other aircraft that may have a similar situation going on here."
Link:
http://www.cbc.ca/documentaries/secrethistory/timeline7.html

The difference is that in the 9/11 CR version, the fourth sentence, "We're, we're involved with something else..." is said by New York Centre, but in the CBC version it's said by the National Command Centre. If the CBC version is true then this means that:

'On Native Soil' to Premiere on CourtTV Tomorrow Night at 10PM EST

A new documentary focused on the 9/11 Commission Report will debut tomorrow night (8/21) on CourtTV at 10PM EST. You can find more about this film at 911report.com including the movie's trailer.

The documentary promises to show new footage of private interviews, and includes this rather interesting quote:

Demanding answers from your government is rarely easy. To accomplish this task, a loose collection of ordinary Americans - united by their single-minded passion for answers - challenged a vast and defensive bureaucracy and triumphed. As a result of their efforts, the tragedy that redefined a nation has been investigated and documented. The collective efforts of these heroes proved that democracy is more powerful than politics.

Seems kind of ironic to me that this film touts the work of victim's families who fought for a commission, but then suggests that the commission was a success. Perhaps they will play the other upcoming documentary on the 9/11 Commission to show both sides of the story? You can contact CourtTV here to ask.

So, check it out tomorrow night, and send your feedback in after the show.

thanks to RemoveBush for the heads up!