The 9/11 Omission Commission & the Lapdog Press.

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On July 22nd, 2005, Rep. Cynthia McKinney and her staff brought together a varied collection of researchers and critics for a Congressional briefing.

The briefing was entitled; The 9/11 Commission Report One Year Later: A Citizen's Response - Did They Get It Right?

There was no national media coverage for what may have been the most important meeting regarding September 11th, 2001, to occur this year. With one exception; an article by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

 The headline, 'McKinney Re-Opens 9/11' suggests that 9/11 was closed. However, judging by the testimony given at this briefing, the only people who consider 9/11 'closed' are the individuals who make up the administration of George Walker Bush, and the carefully selected members of the 9/11 Commission.

The sub-heading, 'Conspiracy theories implicating president aired at 8-hour hearing' is even more misleading, suggesting that what happened that day was no more than CT claptrap. What a slap in the face to the people who presented their issues with the Report in a very coherent and organized manner that day.

The fact of the manner is that the 9/11 Commission's Final Report has been a failure for thousands of Americans, and nobody can attest to that more cogently and personally than Laurie Van Auken.

Former CIA analyst, Mel Goodman, gives a more accurate picture of what transpired on July 22nd in one paragraph;

"Most of the testimony dealt with the flaws of the 9/11 commission and the reform proposals, the reform legislation of 2004 and the policies of the Bush administration that have led to a tragic, unnecessary war in Iraq. Testimony from family members of Sept. 11 victims concentrated on the need for further investigation, not on conspiracy theory. My testimony criticized the commission for ignoring issues of accountability and promoting reforms that merely redesigned the architecture of the intelligence community. None of the reforms would have prevented the intelligence abuses of the run-up to the Iraq war, let alone another terrorist attack."

Rep. McKinney penned an Op-Ed in response to the AJC's mediocre and misleading coverage, which the AJC bravely ignored;

"Your reporter has done the concerned family members and scholars present a disservice by his defamatory remarks which continue to hide from the American public the many unexplored facts and unanswered questions that mark our understanding of and response to 9/11. I hope the public and the citizens in my district in Georgia will take the opportunity to hear this new evidence through C-SPAN, Pacifica Radio, and my own website.

Certainly the dozens of panelists who spoke about post-9/11 violations of civil rights and liberties, the rise of secrecy and the hidden costs of covert operations and consolidation of intelligence, and the rise of the neoconservative view in foreign policy and a new "Pax Americana" and permanent warfare that ignore international law or the alternatives of restoring justice and peace cannot be called "conspiracy theorists" because they question the immediate response and flawed recommendations that now guide legislation and a new security paradigm."

But let's get back to the lack of media coverage. Isn't an unresponsive corporate media one of the reasons why we all blog here at nowpublic? So, we must turn to alternative voices, like the authoritative voice of Danny Schecter, 'the News Dissector'.

Mr. Schecter is a media critic, and journalist. So, he should not take it personally when I say that he should have left his media critic hat at home on July 22nd, because his report is colored by his earnest attempt to communicate to the longsuffering 9/11 skeptic community that they don't get how the media works.

I think they do. Mr. Schecter even acknowledges that there was no national press in attendance at the National Press Club briefing on July 22nd.

Mr. Schecter, they all got the memo, ok? They chose to not cover the event.

Dr. David Ray Griffin addressed the Press Club, airing a full clothes-line of dirty laundry that the Corporate Press has chosen not to smell. He is the author of 'The New Pearl Harbor' and 'The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions'.

Here, Dr. Griffin points out 115 problems with the report, concluding thusly;

"I will close by pointing out that I concluded my study of what I came to call “the Kean-Zelikow Report” by writing that it, “far from lessening my suspicions about official complicity, has served to confirm them. Why would the minds in charge of this final report engage in such deception if they were not trying to cover up very high crimes?”

As McKinney points out in her opening statement on July 22nd, the shortfalls of the Report are many, and varied;

"How was it that it took over an hour after the first transponder went off before planes were scrambled to meet the threat? All of them too late.

What happened to those reports that surfaced within months of September 11th stating that 7 or more of the alleged hijackers had come forward and claimed that they were victims of stolen identities, they were alive and well, living in Saudi Arabia, Morocco and Tunisia? Why did the Commission choose not even to address this?

What about the terrorist Omar Said Sheikh? Now sitting in a Pakistani prison on charges of participating in the kidnapping and murder of Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Pearl. According to Indian intelligence, this man received orders from a Pakistani General to transfer $100,000 to Mohammed Atta. People all over the world are talking about this story. But not a word about it in the Report.

What about Osama bin Laden and his role in the Mujahadin backed by the CIA in the 1980’s to fight the Soviets? The Commission didn’t go there."

As Mel Goodman pointed out, the briefing was not limited to Conspiracy Theories, but covered much ground, including the virtually ignored history of US intel, Al Qaeda, Pakistan's ISI, and the illicit drug trade, as panelist Peter Dale Scott points out;

"The truth is that for at least two decades the United States has engaged in energetic covert programs to secure U.S. control over the Persian Gulf, and also to open up Central Asia for development by U.S. oil companies. Americans were eager to gain access to the petroleum reserves of the Caspian Basin, which at that time were still estimated to be “the largest known reserves of unexploited fuel in the planet.”

To this end, time after time, U.S. covert operations in the region have used so-called “Arab Afghan” warriors as assets, the jihadis whom we loosely link with the name and leadership of al Qaeda. In country after country these “Arab Afghans” have been involved in trafficking Afghan heroin.

America’s sponsorship of drug-trafficking Muslim warriors, including those now in Al Qaeda, dates back to the Afghan War of 1979-89, sponsored in part by the CIA’s links to the drug-laundering Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI). It was part of CIA Director Casey’s strategy for launching covert operations over and above those approved and financed by a Democratic-controlled Congress.

The most conspicuous example of this alliance with drug-traffickers in the 1980s was the Contra support operation. Here again foreign money and drug profits filled the gap after Congress denied funds through the so-called Boland amendments; in this case government funds were used to lie about the Contras to the American people.[ This was followed by a massive cover-up, in which a dubious role was played by then-Congressman Lee Hamilton, later of the 9/11 Commission."

Author and Professor, Anne Norton, dissected the political agenda of Neoconservatism, during the briefing, and like High School biology class, it wasn't pretty;

"Neoconservatives have a rather different and rather disturbing profile. They want a strong state, a state that will put its strength to use. That allies itself with, and will empower, corporations. They have an economic rhetoric that speaks to the concerns of small business, small property owners, and working people, but the benefits are given to wealthy individuals and corporations.

They reject the vulgarity of mass culture, they deplore the decadence of artists and intellectuals, although often not religious themselves, they ally themselves with religion and religious crusades. They encourage family values, for women, a return to children, cooking, and the church.

They make a romance of war, arguing that war will restore manliness, private virtue and public spirit. They favor the expansion of executive power. They admire authoritarian leaders abroad, especially Pakistan’s Pervez Musharraf, and they argue that America itself would profit from a more authoritarian Presidency, and what they call a more disciplined democracy.

A more disciplined democracy as they define it is one with more surveillance of the people, more secrecy in the government, and willingness to employ methods earlier conservatives, and indeed, earlier Americans would have rejected. The curtailment of Civil Rights, and of course, torture."

Here is the harsh reality; the 9/11 Commission Final Report is a Whitewash that would make Mark Twain flash a shy grin of admiration under that famous moustache.

As Benjamin DeMott explained in Harper's in October, 2004;

"The hostility to critical thought is evident, of course, in the remarkable vehemence of the Commission’s assault on the blaming sensibility—its multifariousness, its canniness, the powerful synchrony between it and the nation’s ever increasing hunger for the upbeat and the positive. But almost equally telling is the decision not to treat the audience as citizens with minds to be challenged but—regularly—as children with a taste for fairy tales...

The Commission’s book comes on, bewilderingly, as a pop entertainment, observing the conventions of old-time nonfiction narrative, tucking into out-of-the-way corners passages that approach complex or abstract matters. Chapters open with standard ominous-menace hooks (dread is nigh and no one suspects): “Tuesday, September 11, 2001, dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States.” Chapters end with nightmare curtain lines: “If the instigation for jihad against the Jews and Americans to liberate the holy places ‘is considered a crime,’ [Bin Laden] said, ‘let history be a witness that I am a criminal.’” Children’s book talkdown is leaned on to allay anxiety that some dry-as-dust, demanding lecture, bereft of entertainment value, on a quick-doze topic such as government organization, is in the offing: “We mention many personalities in this report. As in any study of the U.S. government, some of the most important characters are institutions. We will introduce various agencies, and how they adapted to a new kind of terrorism.” Hide-and-seek games are also played, particularly with presidential comments, which are scattered throughout like Hansel and Gretel breadcrumbs...

The pop ambience helps explain the huge sales. It encourages relaxation, discourages the student posture—the ambition to learn, understand, find solid ground for judgments. (This will be gripping, Reader, not taxing. Enjoy.) The invitation to lighten up in itself evokes non-judgmentalism, not lesson learning, as the key to having a nice day.

The Commission, in sum, offers peace through exculpation, evasion, and entertainment—and in doing so dangerously reenergizes a national relish for fantasy. Given a chance to brace the electorate with incontrovertible evidence that the search for leadership must be a search for flexible intelligence, endlessly curious and rapid, devouring in its appetite for the whole body of knowledge bearing on fateful choices, the Commission speaks out for loose-limbed feel-good geniality and artful dodging. Its vote for harmony is perfectly comprehensible, but as the costs of the vote are weighed, the imperative of protest against it stands forth as immensely more comprehensible—and just. “In all the general concerns,” James Fenimore Cooper wrote long ago, in 1838, “the publick has a right to be treated with candor. Without this manly and republican quality . . . [American] institutions are converted into stupendous fraud.” Faced with The 9/11 Commission Report, this country’s true need now is to shout Shame!"

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in ourselves, but in the Fourth Estate, the press. For without their clamor for truth, our masters may do as they please, even deceitfully they shall practice their arts, till all is in ruin.

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A flourish of the quill to:

911CitizensWatch

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C-SPAN2 will be broadcasting the 9/11 briefing in two parts;

Part 1 airs Wednesday August 31, at 8pm EDT.

Part 2 airs Friday September 2, at 8pm EDT.

Have a house party, and get caught up.